Just like oil powered the industrial age, conversational data is the digital fuel of the A.I. era. Reddit, a 20-year-old platform hosting forums used by roughly 500 million people each week, is one of the internet’s largest reservoirs of online conversation, making it a gold mine for large language models (LLMs) that rely on massive datasets to generate text. “The content on Reddit has, effectively, become like oil,” Reddit co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman said at the Fast Company Most Innovative Companies Summit today (May 19) in New York City. “LLMs would not exist as we know them without Reddit.”
The executive co-founded Reddit in 2005 alongside his college roommate, Alexis Ohanian, before departing in 2009, when it was acquired by Condé Nast. Six years later, Huffman returned as CEO and has led the company ever since, guiding it through milestones like its 2024 IPO.
Now, Huffman must contend with an ever-changing online landscape dominated by A.I. Reddit’s prominence in training such systems has led the firm to engage in varying relationships with the industry’s frontier firms: it has signed formal licensing agreements with some, including OpenAI and Google, but has sued others, like Anthropic and Perplexity AI, for allegedly scraping Reddit’s content without authorization.
“We’ve been selective in who we work with,” said Huffman. “Where our data is going—how it’s being used, especially when used for commercial purposes—is really important to us,” added the CEO, who noted that Reddit’s A.I. deals typically include guardrails around data use and access, along with collaborations on A.I. products.
Reddit has also launched its own A.I. features, most notably “Reddit Answers,” a conversational search tool that draws on the platform’s data. The feature is particularly useful for open-ended questions—like what films to watch—because it surfaces a range of human perspectives, according to Huffman. “There’s not a truth—there’s just a lot of people’s opinions.”
The company has also deployed A.I. in areas like moderation, labeling and translation—tasks that Huffman described as “digital manual labor.” The use of A.I. for moderation, in particular, is revolutionary, according to the CEO. “The worst job on the Internet used to be looking at the worst content on the Internet, deciding whether it could be online or not,” he said. “That job just goes away.”
In some cases, however, A.I.’s rise is less welcome. Bots and “A.I. slop,” or low-quality content generated by A.I., are growing concerns. While not entirely new, their recent surge represents “a new front in an old war,” said Huffman. Gray areas are also emerging, such as whether users who rely on A.I. to write posts should be treated as bots. In keeping with Reddit’s user-driven ethos, “Redditors” themselves will likely help decide how to navigate those questions, he added.
Despite the challenges, Huffman believes Reddit’s core purpose will endure. Advances in A.I. search and interface design may reshape the platform, but its foundation remains the same. “We believe for sure, until the end of time—whenever that is—people will always want to talk to other people about their interests and passions and things they have in common.”
The broader internet may also see less disruption than many expect, Huffman said. “For what it’s worth, things never change as much as people think.”