Reddit will use AI to summarize its insanely long threads and could transform the service

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Reddit threads can be incredibly long, and sometimes it’s challenging to figure out what they’re really about, regardless of the title. Even searching for keywords can be hit or miss. The platform wants to help solve that issue and later this year plans to release a new AI-powered feature that will generate summaries at the top of search results.

The idea is straightforward: AI fueled by large language models is good at condensing and summarizing big chunks of text, like those filling Reddit threads. By making these summaries part of Reddit’s search system, users can more quickly find the content they’re looking for at the time. There are millions of posts and comments added to Reddit every day, and parsing them for the content you’re actually interested in would be a lot easier with an AI assistant to distill everything into concise explanations.

“Reddit’s content is uniquely valuable and becoming more important in the context of Internet search. Users run over 1 billion search queries a month on Reddit today, and our product work is improving the search experience and success rate on the platform,” Reddit CEO Steve Huffman explained during the call. “Later this year, we will begin testing new search result pages powered by AI to summarize and recommend content, helping users dive deeper into product shows, games and discover new communities on Reddit.”

Reddit AI

Huffman said the AI-powered summaries will use both first-party and third-party models to produce accurate and relevant summaries. The third-party element is notable since Reddit has recently closed off access to its data to companies that haven't reached specific deals with the company about doing so. Right now, that's basically just Google and OpenAI. Reddit also has a separate deal with OpenAI that allows Reddit to use OpenAI's LLMs for AI-powered features.

This isn't Reddit's only experiment with AI on the site. The call also discussed the success of Reddit's AI language translation feature. The translator lets users engage with content in languages they may not speak, including German, Spanish, and Portuguese. Huffman partially credited the translator with making France one of Reddit’s fastest-growing user bases.

Offering AI-generated summaries arguably represents an even bigger opening for new Reddit users than the translation service. Seeing a summary at the top of a page helps people grasp what is under discussion much more quickly than diving into the whole thread, especially if it's large enough to discourage casual users from even beginning to do so. Easier navigation and absorption could make Reddit a much friendlier place to those who might not have a lot of time. Of course, that's only true if the AI summaries are good enough to avoid some of the issues that led Google to cut back on its AI Overviews in search responses.

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Eric Hal Schwartz is a freelance writer for TechRadar with more than 15 years of experience covering the intersection of the world and technology. For the last five years, he served as head writer for Voicebot.ai and was on the leading edge of reporting on generative AI and large language models. He's since become an expert on the products of generative AI models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google Gemini, and every other synthetic media tool. His experience runs the gamut of media, including print, digital, broadcast, and live events. Now, he's continuing to tell the stories people want and need to hear about the rapidly evolving AI space and its impact on their lives. Eric is based in New York City.