Today, OpenAI partnered with Reddit to integrate rich community content into ChatGPT and other products.
With this, OpenAI will get access to a vast repository of community discussions through Reddit’s Data API, enabling OpenAI to enhance ChatGPT and its other products with a more diverse and up-to-date range of human conversations, thereby improving AI understanding and user interaction.
On the other hand, Reddit will leverage OpenAI products to introduce new features for users and moderators, expanding engagement and community functionality.
“We are thrilled to partner with Reddit to enhance ChatGPT with uniquely timely and relevant information and to explore the possibilities to enrich the Reddit experience with AI-powered features,” said Brad Lightcap, OpenAI COO, in a blog post.
“Reddit has become one of the internet’s largest open archives of authentic, relevant, and always up-to-date human conversations about anything and everything. Including it in ChatGPT upholds our belief in a connected internet, helps people find more of what they’re looking for, and helps new audiences find community on Reddit,” said Steve Huffman, Reddit co-founder and CEO.
“Sam Altman is a shareholder in Reddit. This partnership was led by OpenAI’s COO and approved by its independent Board of Directors,” mentions the blog in italics.
Interestingly, OpenAI also said that it would become a Reddit advertising partner. The company is definitely building something bigger than search, giving tough competition to Google and Perplexity.
A few days back, OpenAI hired Shivakumar Venkataraman, a 21-year Google veteran who previously led the company’s search ads business, as its new vice president. Venkataraman’s extensive experience in search advertising at Google makes him a valuable asset for OpenAI as it plans to build ‘Google Search Alternative’.
Reactions So Far…
Users are already pouring in mixed reactions to this development.
It would also be interesting to see how the Reddit community is going to react in the coming days, or probably weeks, similar to what we witnessed after the Stack Overflow partnership with OpenAI, as Reddit is a great platform for a lot of users to digest news and information in real-time than most social media today.
Some believe that X (formerly Twitter) is the next best option. Elon Musk said that Grok will soon offer a humorous take on the news in the spirit of how ‘The Daily Show’ and ‘Colbert Report’ used to be in ancient times.
Google is Here to Stay
Google recently introduced ‘AI Overviews’ at Google I/O 2024. This feature generates summaries for the user’s queries. “Sometimes you want a quick answer, but you don’t have time to piece together all the information you need. Search will do the work for you with AI Overviews,” said Liz Reid, VP of Google Search.
Google Search is Powered by the Gemini model customised for Google Search. It combines Gemini’s advanced capabilities — including multi-step reasoning, planning, and multimodality — with best-in-class Search systems.
Perplexity is also upping its game. Against the backdrop of these developments, Perplexity onboarded three industry leaders as new advisors to boost search, mobile and distribution: Emil Michael (ex-Uber), Rich Miner (Android co-founder), and Mikhail Parakhin (ex-Bing CEO).