JOHN HERRMAN

Except for Wikipedia, maybe, no independent website has provided as much raw training data for as many AI firms, authorized or not, as Reddit. As a corpus for machines trying to sound or reason like people, it’s immensely valuable: pre-organized, pre-moderated, cleaned and sorted by the input of millions of volunteers and users, and written, unlike so much else on the web, without SEO, traffic, or advertisers in mind. Likewise, its relationship with OpenAI runs deeper than the deal announced in early 2024 through which Reddit licensed data to OpenAI for training and to bring Reddit content directly into ChatGPT.

Except for Wikipedia, maybe, no independent website has provided as much raw training data for as many AI firms, authorized or not, as Reddit. As a corpus for machines trying to sound or reason like people, it’s immensely valuable: pre-organized, pre-moderated, cleaned and sorted by the input of millions of volunteers and users, and written, unlike so much else on the web, without SEO, traffic, or advertisers in mind. Likewise, its relationship with OpenAI runs deeper than the deal announced in early 2024 through which Reddit licensed data to OpenAI for training and to bring Reddit content directly into ChatGPT.