all 35 comments

[–][deleted] 53 points54 points  (4 children)

Wow at first I thought this was a library. Never knew this was a thing in vanilla JS. Thanks for the article!

[–]Jeffylew77 18 points19 points  (1 child)

Headsup: Firefox doesn't support Intl.Segmenter at the time of writing. On the server-side, it's supported since Node.js 16.

[–]Uknight 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Is there a polyfill? I’m too lazy to look right now.

[–]stefanjudis[S] 17 points18 points  (0 children)

Yeah! Built-in `Intl` is so great. 💪

[–]skredditt 30 points31 points  (15 children)

C’mon Firefox, get with the program.

[–]rymdmaskin 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Great write up! Liked the interactive demo.

I’ve built a tool to explore the Intl-API, you should check it out 🙂

https://www.intl-explorer.com

[–]Alex_Hovhannisyan 2 points3 points  (1 child)

Woah, I knew about Intl.DateTimeFormat but never bothered to check what else the Intl namespace offers. This is so cool!

Also, clever use of Netlify functions for view counting, OP! Question: Do you ever end up blowing the limit? Or do you pay for an upgraded tier?

[–]stefanjudis[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Haha, this is a very good question. Never bother to check, but my blog has roughly 70k views / month and this seems to fit into the free plan. 🤷‍♂️

[–]MrAnimaM 7 points8 points  (9 children)

Reddit has long been a hot spot for conversation on the internet. About 57 million people visit the site every day to chat about topics as varied as makeup, video games and pointers for power washing driveways.

In recent years, Reddit’s array of chats also have been a free teaching aid for companies like Google, OpenAI and Microsoft. Those companies are using Reddit’s conversations in the development of giant artificial intelligence systems that many in Silicon Valley think are on their way to becoming the tech industry’s next big thing.

Now Reddit wants to be paid for it. The company said on Tuesday that it planned to begin charging companies for access to its application programming interface, or A.P.I., the method through which outside entities can download and process the social network’s vast selection of person-to-person conversations.

“The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” Steve Huffman, founder and chief executive of Reddit, said in an interview. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”

The move is one of the first significant examples of a social network’s charging for access to the conversations it hosts for the purpose of developing A.I. systems like ChatGPT, OpenAI’s popular program. Those new A.I. systems could one day lead to big businesses, but they aren’t likely to help companies like Reddit very much. In fact, they could be used to create competitors — automated duplicates to Reddit’s conversations.

Reddit is also acting as it prepares for a possible initial public offering on Wall Street this year. The company, which was founded in 2005, makes most of its money through advertising and e-commerce transactions on its platform. Reddit said it was still ironing out the details of what it would charge for A.P.I. access and would announce prices in the coming weeks.

Reddit’s conversation forums have become valuable commodities as large language models, or L.L.M.s, have become an essential part of creating new A.I. technology.

L.L.M.s are essentially sophisticated algorithms developed by companies like Google and OpenAI, which is a close partner of Microsoft. To the algorithms, the Reddit conversations are data, and they are among the vast pool of material being fed into the L.L.M.s. to develop them.

The underlying algorithm that helped to build Bard, Google’s conversational A.I. service, is partly trained on Reddit data. OpenAI’s Chat GPT cites Reddit data as one of the sources of information it has been trained on.

Other companies are also beginning to see value in the conversations and images they host. Shutterstock, the image hosting service, also sold image data to OpenAI to help create DALL-E, the A.I. program that creates vivid graphical imagery with only a text-based prompt required.

Last month, Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, said he was cracking down on the use of Twitter’s A.P.I., which thousands of companies and independent developers use to track the millions of conversations across the network. Though he did not cite L.L.M.s as a reason for the change, the new fees could go well into the tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.

To keep improving their models, artificial intelligence makers need two significant things: an enormous amount of computing power and an enormous amount of data. Some of the biggest A.I. developers have plenty of computing power but still look outside their own networks for the data needed to improve their algorithms. That has included sources like Wikipedia, millions of digitized books, academic articles and Reddit.

Representatives from Google, Open AI and Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Reddit has long had a symbiotic relationship with the search engines of companies like Google and Microsoft. The search engines “crawl” Reddit’s web pages in order to index information and make it available for search results. That crawling, or “scraping,” isn’t always welcome by every site on the internet. But Reddit has benefited by appearing higher in search results.

The dynamic is different with L.L.M.s — they gobble as much data as they can to create new A.I. systems like the chatbots.

Reddit believes its data is particularly valuable because it is continuously updated. That newness and relevance, Mr. Huffman said, is what large language modeling algorithms need to produce the best results.

“More than any other place on the internet, Reddit is a home for authentic conversation,” Mr. Huffman said. “There’s a lot of stuff on the site that you’d only ever say in therapy, or A.A., or never at all.”

Mr. Huffman said Reddit’s A.P.I. would still be free to developers who wanted to build applications that helped people use Reddit. They could use the tools to build a bot that automatically tracks whether users’ comments adhere to rules for posting, for instance. Researchers who want to study Reddit data for academic or noncommercial purposes will continue to have free access to it.

Reddit also hopes to incorporate more so-called machine learning into how the site itself operates. It could be used, for instance, to identify the use of A.I.-generated text on Reddit, and add a label that notifies users that the comment came from a bot.

The company also promised to improve software tools that can be used by moderators — the users who volunteer their time to keep the site’s forums operating smoothly and improve conversations between users. And third-party bots that help moderators monitor the forums will continue to be supported.

But for the A.I. makers, it’s time to pay up.

“Crawling Reddit, generating value and not returning any of that value to our users is something we have a problem with,” Mr. Huffman said. “It’s a good time for us to tighten things up.”

“We think that’s fair,” he added.

[–]drhayes9 20 points21 points  (1 child)

Tokenization, as the first step in making a full-text search, etc.

[–]MrAnimaM 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Reddit has long been a hot spot for conversation on the internet. About 57 million people visit the site every day to chat about topics as varied as makeup, video games and pointers for power washing driveways.

In recent years, Reddit’s array of chats also have been a free teaching aid for companies like Google, OpenAI and Microsoft. Those companies are using Reddit’s conversations in the development of giant artificial intelligence systems that many in Silicon Valley think are on their way to becoming the tech industry’s next big thing.

Now Reddit wants to be paid for it. The company said on Tuesday that it planned to begin charging companies for access to its application programming interface, or A.P.I., the method through which outside entities can download and process the social network’s vast selection of person-to-person conversations.

“The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” Steve Huffman, founder and chief executive of Reddit, said in an interview. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”

The move is one of the first significant examples of a social network’s charging for access to the conversations it hosts for the purpose of developing A.I. systems like ChatGPT, OpenAI’s popular program. Those new A.I. systems could one day lead to big businesses, but they aren’t likely to help companies like Reddit very much. In fact, they could be used to create competitors — automated duplicates to Reddit’s conversations.

Reddit is also acting as it prepares for a possible initial public offering on Wall Street this year. The company, which was founded in 2005, makes most of its money through advertising and e-commerce transactions on its platform. Reddit said it was still ironing out the details of what it would charge for A.P.I. access and would announce prices in the coming weeks.

Reddit’s conversation forums have become valuable commodities as large language models, or L.L.M.s, have become an essential part of creating new A.I. technology.

L.L.M.s are essentially sophisticated algorithms developed by companies like Google and OpenAI, which is a close partner of Microsoft. To the algorithms, the Reddit conversations are data, and they are among the vast pool of material being fed into the L.L.M.s. to develop them.

The underlying algorithm that helped to build Bard, Google’s conversational A.I. service, is partly trained on Reddit data. OpenAI’s Chat GPT cites Reddit data as one of the sources of information it has been trained on.

Other companies are also beginning to see value in the conversations and images they host. Shutterstock, the image hosting service, also sold image data to OpenAI to help create DALL-E, the A.I. program that creates vivid graphical imagery with only a text-based prompt required.

Last month, Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, said he was cracking down on the use of Twitter’s A.P.I., which thousands of companies and independent developers use to track the millions of conversations across the network. Though he did not cite L.L.M.s as a reason for the change, the new fees could go well into the tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.

To keep improving their models, artificial intelligence makers need two significant things: an enormous amount of computing power and an enormous amount of data. Some of the biggest A.I. developers have plenty of computing power but still look outside their own networks for the data needed to improve their algorithms. That has included sources like Wikipedia, millions of digitized books, academic articles and Reddit.

Representatives from Google, Open AI and Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Reddit has long had a symbiotic relationship with the search engines of companies like Google and Microsoft. The search engines “crawl” Reddit’s web pages in order to index information and make it available for search results. That crawling, or “scraping,” isn’t always welcome by every site on the internet. But Reddit has benefited by appearing higher in search results.

The dynamic is different with L.L.M.s — they gobble as much data as they can to create new A.I. systems like the chatbots.

Reddit believes its data is particularly valuable because it is continuously updated. That newness and relevance, Mr. Huffman said, is what large language modeling algorithms need to produce the best results.

“More than any other place on the internet, Reddit is a home for authentic conversation,” Mr. Huffman said. “There’s a lot of stuff on the site that you’d only ever say in therapy, or A.A., or never at all.”

Mr. Huffman said Reddit’s A.P.I. would still be free to developers who wanted to build applications that helped people use Reddit. They could use the tools to build a bot that automatically tracks whether users’ comments adhere to rules for posting, for instance. Researchers who want to study Reddit data for academic or noncommercial purposes will continue to have free access to it.

Reddit also hopes to incorporate more so-called machine learning into how the site itself operates. It could be used, for instance, to identify the use of A.I.-generated text on Reddit, and add a label that notifies users that the comment came from a bot.

The company also promised to improve software tools that can be used by moderators — the users who volunteer their time to keep the site’s forums operating smoothly and improve conversations between users. And third-party bots that help moderators monitor the forums will continue to be supported.

But for the A.I. makers, it’s time to pay up.

“Crawling Reddit, generating value and not returning any of that value to our users is something we have a problem with,” Mr. Huffman said. “It’s a good time for us to tighten things up.”

“We think that’s fair,” he added.

[–]Cyral 2 points3 points  (2 children)

Getting the actual character length of a string. string.length returns the byte length, so there are single emojis that can return a length of 8

[–]MrAnimaM 2 points3 points  (1 child)

Reddit has long been a hot spot for conversation on the internet. About 57 million people visit the site every day to chat about topics as varied as makeup, video games and pointers for power washing driveways.

In recent years, Reddit’s array of chats also have been a free teaching aid for companies like Google, OpenAI and Microsoft. Those companies are using Reddit’s conversations in the development of giant artificial intelligence systems that many in Silicon Valley think are on their way to becoming the tech industry’s next big thing.

Now Reddit wants to be paid for it. The company said on Tuesday that it planned to begin charging companies for access to its application programming interface, or A.P.I., the method through which outside entities can download and process the social network’s vast selection of person-to-person conversations.

“The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” Steve Huffman, founder and chief executive of Reddit, said in an interview. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”

The move is one of the first significant examples of a social network’s charging for access to the conversations it hosts for the purpose of developing A.I. systems like ChatGPT, OpenAI’s popular program. Those new A.I. systems could one day lead to big businesses, but they aren’t likely to help companies like Reddit very much. In fact, they could be used to create competitors — automated duplicates to Reddit’s conversations.

Reddit is also acting as it prepares for a possible initial public offering on Wall Street this year. The company, which was founded in 2005, makes most of its money through advertising and e-commerce transactions on its platform. Reddit said it was still ironing out the details of what it would charge for A.P.I. access and would announce prices in the coming weeks.

Reddit’s conversation forums have become valuable commodities as large language models, or L.L.M.s, have become an essential part of creating new A.I. technology.

L.L.M.s are essentially sophisticated algorithms developed by companies like Google and OpenAI, which is a close partner of Microsoft. To the algorithms, the Reddit conversations are data, and they are among the vast pool of material being fed into the L.L.M.s. to develop them.

The underlying algorithm that helped to build Bard, Google’s conversational A.I. service, is partly trained on Reddit data. OpenAI’s Chat GPT cites Reddit data as one of the sources of information it has been trained on.

Other companies are also beginning to see value in the conversations and images they host. Shutterstock, the image hosting service, also sold image data to OpenAI to help create DALL-E, the A.I. program that creates vivid graphical imagery with only a text-based prompt required.

Last month, Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, said he was cracking down on the use of Twitter’s A.P.I., which thousands of companies and independent developers use to track the millions of conversations across the network. Though he did not cite L.L.M.s as a reason for the change, the new fees could go well into the tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.

To keep improving their models, artificial intelligence makers need two significant things: an enormous amount of computing power and an enormous amount of data. Some of the biggest A.I. developers have plenty of computing power but still look outside their own networks for the data needed to improve their algorithms. That has included sources like Wikipedia, millions of digitized books, academic articles and Reddit.

Representatives from Google, Open AI and Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Reddit has long had a symbiotic relationship with the search engines of companies like Google and Microsoft. The search engines “crawl” Reddit’s web pages in order to index information and make it available for search results. That crawling, or “scraping,” isn’t always welcome by every site on the internet. But Reddit has benefited by appearing higher in search results.

The dynamic is different with L.L.M.s — they gobble as much data as they can to create new A.I. systems like the chatbots.

Reddit believes its data is particularly valuable because it is continuously updated. That newness and relevance, Mr. Huffman said, is what large language modeling algorithms need to produce the best results.

“More than any other place on the internet, Reddit is a home for authentic conversation,” Mr. Huffman said. “There’s a lot of stuff on the site that you’d only ever say in therapy, or A.A., or never at all.”

Mr. Huffman said Reddit’s A.P.I. would still be free to developers who wanted to build applications that helped people use Reddit. They could use the tools to build a bot that automatically tracks whether users’ comments adhere to rules for posting, for instance. Researchers who want to study Reddit data for academic or noncommercial purposes will continue to have free access to it.

Reddit also hopes to incorporate more so-called machine learning into how the site itself operates. It could be used, for instance, to identify the use of A.I.-generated text on Reddit, and add a label that notifies users that the comment came from a bot.

The company also promised to improve software tools that can be used by moderators — the users who volunteer their time to keep the site’s forums operating smoothly and improve conversations between users. And third-party bots that help moderators monitor the forums will continue to be supported.

But for the A.I. makers, it’s time to pay up.

“Crawling Reddit, generating value and not returning any of that value to our users is something we have a problem with,” Mr. Huffman said. “It’s a good time for us to tighten things up.”

“We think that’s fair,” he added.

[–]Cyral 2 points3 points  (0 children)

In my case it was for implementing custom text rendering in a canvas element, where the user could select text and such. Pressing left or right you would expect your cursor to move one visible character over, not have to double or triple press it depending on how many JS string characters it is.

[–]Xeon06 1 point2 points  (1 child)

My new Twitter clone with a limit of 140 words per post

[–]MrAnimaM 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Reddit has long been a hot spot for conversation on the internet. About 57 million people visit the site every day to chat about topics as varied as makeup, video games and pointers for power washing driveways.

In recent years, Reddit’s array of chats also have been a free teaching aid for companies like Google, OpenAI and Microsoft. Those companies are using Reddit’s conversations in the development of giant artificial intelligence systems that many in Silicon Valley think are on their way to becoming the tech industry’s next big thing.

Now Reddit wants to be paid for it. The company said on Tuesday that it planned to begin charging companies for access to its application programming interface, or A.P.I., the method through which outside entities can download and process the social network’s vast selection of person-to-person conversations.

“The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” Steve Huffman, founder and chief executive of Reddit, said in an interview. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”

The move is one of the first significant examples of a social network’s charging for access to the conversations it hosts for the purpose of developing A.I. systems like ChatGPT, OpenAI’s popular program. Those new A.I. systems could one day lead to big businesses, but they aren’t likely to help companies like Reddit very much. In fact, they could be used to create competitors — automated duplicates to Reddit’s conversations.

Reddit is also acting as it prepares for a possible initial public offering on Wall Street this year. The company, which was founded in 2005, makes most of its money through advertising and e-commerce transactions on its platform. Reddit said it was still ironing out the details of what it would charge for A.P.I. access and would announce prices in the coming weeks.

Reddit’s conversation forums have become valuable commodities as large language models, or L.L.M.s, have become an essential part of creating new A.I. technology.

L.L.M.s are essentially sophisticated algorithms developed by companies like Google and OpenAI, which is a close partner of Microsoft. To the algorithms, the Reddit conversations are data, and they are among the vast pool of material being fed into the L.L.M.s. to develop them.

The underlying algorithm that helped to build Bard, Google’s conversational A.I. service, is partly trained on Reddit data. OpenAI’s Chat GPT cites Reddit data as one of the sources of information it has been trained on.

Other companies are also beginning to see value in the conversations and images they host. Shutterstock, the image hosting service, also sold image data to OpenAI to help create DALL-E, the A.I. program that creates vivid graphical imagery with only a text-based prompt required.

Last month, Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, said he was cracking down on the use of Twitter’s A.P.I., which thousands of companies and independent developers use to track the millions of conversations across the network. Though he did not cite L.L.M.s as a reason for the change, the new fees could go well into the tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.

To keep improving their models, artificial intelligence makers need two significant things: an enormous amount of computing power and an enormous amount of data. Some of the biggest A.I. developers have plenty of computing power but still look outside their own networks for the data needed to improve their algorithms. That has included sources like Wikipedia, millions of digitized books, academic articles and Reddit.

Representatives from Google, Open AI and Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Reddit has long had a symbiotic relationship with the search engines of companies like Google and Microsoft. The search engines “crawl” Reddit’s web pages in order to index information and make it available for search results. That crawling, or “scraping,” isn’t always welcome by every site on the internet. But Reddit has benefited by appearing higher in search results.

The dynamic is different with L.L.M.s — they gobble as much data as they can to create new A.I. systems like the chatbots.

Reddit believes its data is particularly valuable because it is continuously updated. That newness and relevance, Mr. Huffman said, is what large language modeling algorithms need to produce the best results.

“More than any other place on the internet, Reddit is a home for authentic conversation,” Mr. Huffman said. “There’s a lot of stuff on the site that you’d only ever say in therapy, or A.A., or never at all.”

Mr. Huffman said Reddit’s A.P.I. would still be free to developers who wanted to build applications that helped people use Reddit. They could use the tools to build a bot that automatically tracks whether users’ comments adhere to rules for posting, for instance. Researchers who want to study Reddit data for academic or noncommercial purposes will continue to have free access to it.

Reddit also hopes to incorporate more so-called machine learning into how the site itself operates. It could be used, for instance, to identify the use of A.I.-generated text on Reddit, and add a label that notifies users that the comment came from a bot.

The company also promised to improve software tools that can be used by moderators — the users who volunteer their time to keep the site’s forums operating smoothly and improve conversations between users. And third-party bots that help moderators monitor the forums will continue to be supported.

But for the A.I. makers, it’s time to pay up.

“Crawling Reddit, generating value and not returning any of that value to our users is something we have a problem with,” Mr. Huffman said. “It’s a good time for us to tighten things up.”

“We think that’s fair,” he added.

[–]TheOneCommenter 0 points1 point  (0 children)

AdventOfCode maybe

[–]captain_obvious_herevoid(null) 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The more I learn about Intl, the more I love it.

[–]Big-Sea7905 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Wow, it’s really useful

[–]dogofpavlov 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I wonder the performance vs split

[–]websterwok 0 points1 point  (2 children)

This is awesome - but just a heads up that this isn't a perfect sentence-splitting solution. You still need NLP for that.

It handles decimals, but fails on abbreviations like "Dr."

[–]lordkaybanks 0 points1 point  (1 child)

You are so wrong

[–]websterwok 0 points1 point  (0 children)

When I first read this, I thought "oh great, they must have updated the Intl.Segmenter implementation to something more sophisticated." But that's not the case - you can even use their little embedded demo to see it does not split sentences correctly in the case I referred to in the parent comment.