Reddit will soon start testing an AI-powered summary feature

Reddit will test artificial intelligence-generated summaries for content, the company announced Tuesday during its earnings call with investors. The AI-powered summaries will appear at the top of search results pages. With the feature, Reddit aims to help users “dive deeper” into the platform’s content, including games, communities and product showcases. The company also reported 342.3 million weekly active users, a 57 percent jump from last year.

AI summaries on Reddit

At the Q2 investors callReddit CEO Steve Huffman revealed that the platform will soon begin testing AI-powered search results pages. It will use the technology to provide summaries of the content searched by the user and also make recommendations. The company official also highlighted the platform’s search prowess, claiming that its users conduct over 1 billion searches per month.

Huffman also praised Reddit’s AI-powered translation feature, naming France as one of the “fastest growing countries” using it. Additionally, support for machine translation will soon be rolling out to German, Spanish, and Portuguese languages, he confirmed.

The move comes a week after Reddit announced the acquisition of Memorable AI, a startup that uses generative AI to help advertisers create better, more engaging ads. It helps them find the text, images and videos that can be most effective in improving ads.

In recent months, the social media website has also forged partnerships with tech giants including Google and OpenAI to leverage AI technologies and build new features for Reddit users. The deal with Google, reportedly worth around $60 million (roughly Rs. 500 crore) per year, will allow the search engine to use Reddit’s content to train its AI models.

Meanwhile, OpenAI now has access to the platform’s Data API to source real-time content for ChatGPT and other products. In turn, Reddit will be able to leverage OpenAI’s large language models (LLMs) to build AI features for its platform.