Reddit: To train Artificial Intelligence you will have to pay. Right decision?

The use of the vast amount of information contained in Reddit databases for the purpose of training large language models will soon be subject to payment. 
It is Steve Huffman, founder, and CEO of the well-known discussion platform, who recently told the New York Times his willingness to monetize access to the contents on the platform for those companies that intend to use Reddit's APIs to train artificial intelligence models.

The details of the project were then published in an announcement on Reddit, which specifies that the APIs will remain free for developers working on bots and other platform tools, and for researchers working on academic projects or non-commercial. In short, the collection of data, information, discussions and anything else used to train an AI will be paid for. The price will be communicated precisely over the next few weeks.

In an interview with the New York Times, Huffman said, "The body of data on Reddit is truly valuable. We don't need to give that value away to some of the biggest companies in the world for free.
Sifting through Reddit, creating value, and don't give back anything that is of value to our users is something that poses a problem for us. It's a good time for us to crack down."

Comments and discussions within Reddit have been a particularly rich resource of information and data also used to train AI models such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Bard.

Reddit's decision should be read within the path that the company is following for the listing on the stock exchange, with an indicative time horizon in the second half of 2023, and therefore in a strategy aimed at presenting itself to investors in the best possible way. 
At the end of 2021, the company had already expressed its willingness to go public but decided to postpone the operation until market conditions appear more stable.