Shares of Reddit were on the rise in premarket trading Friday after the social media company announced a content deal with OpenAI, the Microsoft-backed artificial intelligence company behind ChatGPT and other popular AI tools.

The deal will bring content from Reddit’s vast discussion forums to OpenAI products including ChatGPT, while also giving Reddit users access to new AI tools. In an announcement Thursday, the companies also said that “OpenAI will become a Reddit advertising partner.”

Reddit stock was trading more than 11% higher at the time of this writing, toping $63 a share before the markets opened. That would be close to an all-time high of $65.11 a share set in March, shortly after the company went public.

Real-time content is king

To make its chatbots more useful, OpenAI needs access to real-time information, including breaking news content. It has already announced a number of partnerships with news organizations, including Axel Springer, the Associated Press, and the Financial Times.

Powered by subreddits on every conceivable topic, Reddit discussions offer a unique window into what people are talking about online at any given moment, particularly as other social platforms have willfully disinvested in news.

Reddit has emerged over the years as a default first stop for people searching information on the broader internet. Thursday’s announcement noted that the OpenAI-Reddit deal will place special emphasis on “recent content.”

The AI arms race between tech giants broke through to the next plateau this week in the wake of Google’s I/O developer event, which was focused almost entirely on artificial intelligence. The search giant has since begun to more prominently display AI-generated overviews in response to some searches. If Reddit is to be believed, however, not everyone loves the results.

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