Reddit Announces Plans for Testing AI-Powered Summaries for Search Result Pages

Reddit will begin testing summaries generated using artificial intelligence (AI) for content, the company announced during its earnings call with investors on Tuesday. The AI-powered summaries will appear at the top of the search result pages. Courtesy of this feature, Reddit aims to help users “dive deeper” into the platform’s content, including games, communities and product shows. The company also reported 342.3 million weekly active users, marking a 57 percent jump compared to last year.

AI Summaries on Reddit

At the Q2 investors call, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman revealed that the platform will soon start testing search result pages powered by AI. It will leverage the technology to provide summaries of the content searched by the user and also provide recommendations. The company official also highlighted the platform’s search prowess, claiming its users run over 1 billion search queries a month.

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

This move comes a week after Reddit announced the acquisition of Memorable AI – a startup which leverages generative AI to help advertisers build better and more engaging ads. It helps them find the text, images and videos which can prove to be most effective in improving ads.

In recent months, the social media website has also forged partnerships with technology giants such as Google and OpenAI for leveraging AI technologies and building new features for Reddit users. Its deal with Google, reported to be about $60 million (roughly Rs. 500 crore) a year, allows the search engine to use Reddit’s content for training its AI models.

Meanwhile, OpenAI now has access to the platform’s Data API for sourcing 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.