Shoaib Ansari 
Reddit’s recent modifications to its API policy could potentially have a substantial influence on leading chatbot makers, such as Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI.
Reddit has announced that it will start charging third-party businesses for entry to its application programming interface (API) data.
It has been reported that some of the most sought-after chatbots, such as Google’s Bard, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and Microsoft’s Bing Chat, have been trained using Reddit’s API data.
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Although it is generally recognized that new chatbots based on vast language models have been trained using data from social media sites, Reddit is the first social media network to impose fees on these businesses for data access.
Reddit’s co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman revealed the importance of data on the social media platform in a New York Times interview, claiming that –
“Reddit is a place for authentic conversations, more than any other spot on the internet. There is a lot of content on the site that you would only say in therapy or A.A., or never at all.”
Huffman claims that the critical factor in producing the finest outcomes for vast language models is the use of new and relevant data.
Reddit had over 430 million active users as of 2019, all of whom were active participants in more than 1.2 million special interest communities, according to him.
According to reports, both ChatGPT and Bard have been trained using Reddit data in one way or another.
It is said that large language models are trained by collecting and analyzing user data from Reddit through its API, which allows developers to access Reddit data in a structured and organized way.
Thus far, Microsoft and Google have had a mutually beneficial relationship with Reddit, scraping data from the site to provide accurate search results.
In exchange, Reddit benefits from appearing higher in search rankings and attracting more visitors to its platform.
However, with the advent of chatbots based on vast language models, Reddit has little to gain from allowing these businesses to utilize its data.
Huffman said, “The Reddit corpus of data is truly priceless. However, we do not need to provide all of that worth to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”
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According to Huffman, Reddit’s API data will be provided for free to developers who create applications that improve user experience, although the platform has yet to disclose pricing for other third-party access.
