Reddit has struck a $60m deal with Google that lets the search giant train AI models on its posts

mesamune@lemmy.world to Reddit@lemmy.world – 293 points –
Reddit has struck a $60m deal with Google that lets the search giant train AI models on its posts
fortune.com

Its a bit old, but I just learned it via the retro-dodo article here: https://retrododo.com/google-is-killing-retro-dodo/

89

You are viewing a single comment

Is it just me or are 60 million a ridiculously small price for that whole dataset?

To be fair it's a pretty terrible dataset. The AI is just going to say "this" to every question you ask

Hey, now, be fair. There are some Top 40s song lyrics in there too.

Yeah and Google already has everything scrapped and indexed

3 more...

Perhaps, but not worth buying if you can't make profit or keep it from your competition.

60M is for over almost 20 years of data, but once it's ingested, google will only want new content. Next year, it'll be more like 3M if the dataset isn't poisoned by bots or the AI fad hasn't collapsed. Reddit will struggle with finances again and users will suffer. At least that's my prediction.

Spez has already grifted his money out of the initial stock pump so it literally doesn't matter. Reddit could shut down tomorrow and he'd be happy as a clam.

Yeah, what a load. Though now they can boot his arse and save.

Edited to remove number.

I doubt he's getting 120M per year. I think that big compensation package was a 1 time deal. That's more than Satya Nadella makes.

You're right. Total compensation was $193M for 2023 but that was a lot of stock too. It may have been one time like you said now that they went public. Hopefully enough to retire haha.

the AI fad

LOL. Do you realize that makes you sound like Boomers talking about the internet in the late 90's and early 00's?

It currently looks very much like a bubble. After the dot com bubble, the internet didn't go away, but most companies died off and all the stupid monetisation went bankrupt.

We may be seeing something similar

Haha! Wow I guess so. I'll keep some shelf space available in the geezer museum next to 3D TV's, deep fakes, fidget spinners, and my pogs. :D

I wonder if Google's unlimited legal budget plays a role. Not a lawyer, so probably way off here...

But, for example, reddit's success in part depends on Google ingesting their data --- reddit shows up in Google searches all the time, which can only happen if Google uses reddit's content. So reddit telling Google "you can't use our content" doesn't work, and they need to say something like, "you can use our content for search results but you can't consume it as training data."

This is a pretty straightforward statement/request/demand, but one could imagine Google lawyers maliciously complying and throwing their hands up dramatically, claiming "well we use some amount of AI in our search results, so if we can't use your content for AI training then we can't risk using it for search results." Which would, I imagine, really, really hurt reddit (no Google results would be catastrophic I suspect).

So, perhaps the "low" 60M figure is just Google using their leverage.

Or not. As a random person on the Internet, I can say I'm probably not contributing anything meaningful here...

How quickly you forget that half of it is just "I also choose this guy's wife" and "the narwhal bacon's at midnight"

I'm personally curious whether Reddit actually has any ability to protect that database. I don't remember Reddit TOS, but usually those things give them license to use and copy the data, maybe even to sell it, but not actually the copyright on it. So if someone made a Reddit scraper and copied the comments, wouldn't only the actual commenter be able to sue?

$60M may be reflecting that, in that it's more a convenience fee to shield Google against individual Redditors going after them than something that Reddit itself could actually sue over.

Considering it's all full of Nazis and bots, and if you get to filter all of them out you're left with reposts and low quality memes followed by comments that represent the hostile side of each of us.... I'd say anything over $5 is a good deal for spez.

Now, I hope Google uses this data exclusively for detecting inappropriate answers. Can you imagine it giving answers based on the endless threads i of " I'm not your mate, bro; I'm not your bro, dude.....".

3 more...