Reddit has inked a $60 million deal with an "unnamed AI company," allowing its licensed content to be used to train learning machine models.
The social media announced to its investors ahead of the planned initial public offering launch, according to Bloomberg.
There is not much detail provided on how the deal will ensue or what content will be used to train AI models.
The company previously demanded corporations use its licensed content for AI use as its "corpus of data is really valuable."
Reddit has since shut down previous third-party add-ons on the platform to introduce "a new premium access point for third parties."
Reddit Content on AI-Language Training
Aside from publications, forum boards are a common target for web crawlers which AI companies use to train their large language models.
This is more prevalent in Reddit as text-based discussions contribute to a large number of posts across subreddits.
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman already told the New York Times last year how Reddit provides "a home for authentic conversation."
Reddit is estimated to have 1.66 billion active monthly users last year.
AI Companies Securing Licensed Content Deals Ahead of Regulations
The Reddit AI deal is only among the recent agreements between tech firms as more AI start-ups try to secure a deal while regulations on the technology are still in their early stages.
OpenAI, the leading AI firm in the industry, has signed several deals with news publishers and forum sites over the past months as it continues the development of ChatGPT.
The deals often revolve around allowing AI companies to pay platforms annual fees and services in return for using their licensed content as data sets.
The trend of licensing deals follows after a surge in copyright lawsuits hound AI companies for using licensed content without approval or royalties from the platforms, publishers, and authors.
