Google has inked a $60 million (Sh8.7 billion) deal with Reddit in a groundbreaking move that allows it to leverage posts from the popular online discussion platform to enhance its artificial intelligence (AI) models.
The collaboration, announced on Thursday, not only empowers Google in refining services like Google Search but also grants Reddit access to Google’s AI models for bolstering its internal site search and other features.
The agreement according to a report by CBS News comes at a crucial time for Reddit, coinciding with the company’s plans for an initial public offering (IPO), as revealed in documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Reddit reported a net income of $18.5 million (Sh2.6 billion) in the October-December quarter, marking its first profit in two years, with revenue of $249.8 million (Sh36.2 billion).
The company aims to list its shares on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol RDDT.
The Google deal is a big step for Reddit, which relies on volunteer moderators to run its sprawling array of freewheeling topic-based discussions.
Those moderators have publicly protested earlier Reddit decisions, most recently blacking out much of the site for days when Reddit announced plans to start charging many third-party apps for access to its content.
The data-sharing arrangement is also highly significant for Google which is hungry for access to human-written material it can use to train its AI models to improve their “understanding” of the world and thus their ability to provide relevant answers to questions in a conversational format.
It also sets a precedent for how tech companies go about obtaining data for their growing AI models to feast on, even when it comes to publicly available content.