Steve Huffman

With its millions of daily active users, Reddit remains one of the most formidable homes for user-generated content on the internet. Large language models are always hungry for information and data to train on, and Reddit CEO Steve Huffman has taken advantage of this demand.

In February, he signed a reportedly $60 million deal with Google for their AI model training. Then in May, he forged a partnership with OpenAI, allowing ChatGPT to train on Reddit content. In exchange, OpenAI became a Reddit advertising partner and offered new AI-powered features to Reddit forums. In a statement to TIME, Huffman wrote that Reddit “has grown to be one of the largest archives of human conversation in existence. Reddit content is an essential ingredient used to create AI models—advancing the state of the art—and we, in turn, use AI to advance our mission of creating community for everyone in the world by making Reddit more relevant, more accessible across languages, and better moderated." The deals have kept Reddit’s stock price humming in its first year as a public company.