One of Spez’s answers in the infamous Reddit AMA struck me
Two things happened at the same time: the LLM explosion put all Reddit data use at the forefront, and our continuing efforts to reign in costs…
I am beginning to think all they wanted to do was getting their share of the AI pie, since we know Reddit’s data is one of the major datasets for training conversetional models. But they are such a bunch of bumbling fools, as well as being chronically understaffed, the whole thing exploded in their face. At this stage their only chance if survival may well be to be bought out by OpenAI…
I’m very sure that this is the case. Reddit is pissed they gave away all the content as training data for free while struggling to monetize their platform adequately.
But I suspect the damage is already done. There are projects like “Orca” from Microsoft that skip the learning process from source data for a big part by using chatGPT and GPT4.
They missed the timing but are too stubborn and double down on it