As much as we adore Reddit and all of its weird and wonderful quirks, Elon Musk's latest idea has us a tad concerned.
OpenAI, a nonprofit backed by Musk, is going to use Reddit to teach artificial intelligence about conversations.
To do that, it will be using Nvidia's new DGX-1 supercomputer for training its deep-learning systems with more data at a faster rate: according to MIT Technology Review, the DGX-1 will compute in 10 hours what would normally take 250 hours.
"So right now, if we're training on, say, a month of conversations on Reddit, we can, instead, train on entire years of conversations of people talking to each other on all of Reddit," said OpenAI's Andrej Karpathy in a blog post.
"And then we can get much more data in terms of how people interact with each other. And, eventually, we'll use that to talk to computers, just like we talk to each other."
Weird eggs
While we jest, the site is probably a good a place as any to learn from more informal dialogue.
But lest we forget the meteorically racist rise and fall of Microsoft's Tay chatbot, which was hijacked by internet users out to prove that nothing is sacred.
Hopefully that won't happen with OpenAI's project, though we don't know if DGX-1 will be accessing Subreddits like /r/birdswitharms, /r/monkslookingatbeer, /r/weirdeggs, the ever-bizarre /r/FifthWorldPics, or any of the more sinister parts of the site.
Frankly, we don't want to know.
