Just as oil fueled the industrial age, conversational data is the digital fuel of the AI age. Reddit, a 20-year-old platform that hosts forums used by nearly 500 million people each week, is one of the Internet’s largest reservoirs of online conversation, making it a goldmine for large language models (LLMs) that rely on massive datasets to generate text. “Content on Reddit has become like oil,” Reddit co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman said at Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies Summit today (May 19) in New York City. “LLM programs wouldn’t exist as we know them without Reddit.”
The CEO co-founded Reddit in 2005 alongside his college classmate, Alexis Ohanian, before leaving in 2009, when it was acquired by Condé Nast. Six years later, Hoffman returned to the CEO role and has led the company ever since, guiding it through milestones such as its 2024 initial public offering.
Now, Hoffman must contend with an ever-changing internet landscape dominated by artificial intelligence. Reddit’s prominence in training such systems has led the company to engage in various relationships with frontier companies in the industry: it has signed formal licensing agreements with some, including OpenAI and Google, but has sued others, such as Anthropic and Perplexity AI, for allegedly stealing Reddit content without permission.
“We’ve been selective about who we work with,” Hoffman said. “Where our data goes — and how it’s used, especially when used for business purposes — is really important to us,” the CEO added, noting that Reddit’s AI deals typically include guardrails around data use and access, along with collaboration on AI products.
Reddit has also launched its own AI features, most notably “Reddit Answers,” a conversation research tool based on the platform’s data. This feature is especially useful for open-ended questions — such as which movies to watch — because it highlights a range of human perspectives, according to Hoffman. “There’s no truth, there’s just a lot of people’s opinions.”
The company has also deployed artificial intelligence in areas such as moderation, tagging and translation, tasks that Hoffman described as “digital manual labor.” The use of AI for moderation, in particular, is revolutionary, according to the CEO. “The worst job on the Internet is looking at the worst content on the Internet and determining whether it could be on the Internet or not,” he said. “This job is just disappearing.”
But in some cases, the rise of AI is not welcome. Bots and “AI slop,” or low-quality content generated by artificial intelligence, are growing concerns. While their recent surge isn’t exactly new, it represents “a new front in an old war,” Hoffman said. Gray areas also emerge, such as whether users who rely on artificial intelligence to write posts should be treated as bots. He added that, in keeping with Reddit’s user-driven ethos, Redditors themselves will likely help decide how to approach these questions.
Despite the challenges, Huffman believes Reddit’s core purpose will continue. Advances in AI research and interface design may reshape the platform, but its foundation remains the same. “We definitely believe that until the end of time – whenever that happens – people will always want to talk to others about their interests, passions and things they have in common.”
The broader internet may also see less disruption than many expect, Hoffman said. “For what it’s worth, things never change as much as people think.”
