- As Reddit prepares to go public, a brand new submitting with the SEC has revealed its greatest backers.
- OpenAI’s Sam Altman is the third-largest shareholder, the submitting revealed.
- It was beforehand identified he was a Reddit investor — however to not this extent.
We realized a brand new element about Sam Altman Thursday: simply how a lot he helps Reddit.
In preparation for its highly-anticipated IPO, the net social discussion board filed an S-1 kind with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday, detailing the corporate’s monetary background. The submitting revealed that Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, owns an 8.7% stake within the firm.
Altman was beforehand identified to be an investor in Reddit, although precisely how a lot he owned has not been disclosed till now — the corporate has to share that now because it intends to go public. And seems he’s the third-largest shareholder within the social networking website. Altman controls 8.7% of the corporate’s inventory, per the submitting.
He comes behind Advance, owned by the Newhouse household, which owns 30% of the corporate, whereas Chinese firm Tencent has 11%, in line with The Hollywood Reporter.
Altman additionally served seven years on Reddit’s board till 2022.
Reddit is the primary social media firm to submit an preliminary public providing since Pinterest in 2019, and it is the primary main tech firm to file for an IPO in 2024.
While the corporate reported a 20% rise in income final yr in comparison with the yr earlier than, it nonetheless struggled to show a revenue, in line with Bloomberg.
However, AI could also be a key income supply for Reddit. On Thursday, Reddit introduced that it has entered into a knowledge licensing settlement with Google. The search engine firm will pay the corporate $60 million a yr for entry to its content material.
Reddit does not presently have a knowledge licensing take care of OpenAI, although.
“Reddit’s vast and unmatched archive of real, timely, and relevant human conversation on literally any topic is an invaluable dataset for a variety of purposes, including search, AI training, and research,” Reddit cofounder Steve Huffman wrote in a letter hooked up to Thursday’s SEC submitting.
“We expect our data advantage and intellectual property to continue to be a key element in the training of future LLMs,” he wrote, referring to massive language fashions, a kind of program utilized by AI techniques like Altman’s ChatGPT.
The idea of working this intently with AI firms hasn’t gone over nice with some Reddit customers, who’ve criticized the thought of profiting off customers’ information with out their consent.
Reddit would not be the one social media firm to let AI firms faucet into customers’ conversations. Elon Musk‘s new AI chatbot, Grok, is educated on X consumer information.