The Reddit administration is preparing to begin testing search using artificial intelligence – on a page with such results, the system will offer “summaries and recommendations of content,” platform CEO Steve Huffman said in a conversation with investors after the publication of the quarterly report.
Image source: Reddit
Integrating AI into the search function will help platform users “dive deeper” into content and discover new Reddit communities; the experiment will begin this year. The new format will use both the platform’s own technologies and third-party solutions, explained Mr. Huffman. Something similar was supposed to appear in the near future: in May, the company announced a partnership with OpenAI. The AI technology developer allowed the platform to use its large language models and helped delegate some moderation powers, in exchange for the right to use Reddit content to train its systems. At the beginning of the year, the platform entered into a similar agreement with Google.
AI technologies have become an important topic in the conversation with investors and analysts. Huffman spoke about the quality of machine translation on Reddit and noted that the community of users from France is actively growing on the platform. The translation function into German, Spanish and Portuguese is now being expanded. Reddit has presented its second quarterly report since going public. For the second quarter, the company’s revenue amounted to $281.2 million, which is higher than Wall Street analysts’ forecasts – they expected $253.8 million; the number of weekly active users amounted to 342.3 million people, which is 57% more than a year earlier.