Reddit launches AI ad tools
June 17, 2025
Welcome back. AI "Godfather" Geoffrey Hinton just delivered some brutally honest career advice: AI will replace all "mundane intellectual labor" like paralegals and call centers, but plumbing jobs are safe because robots struggle with physical manipulation. Check out the full interview here.
— The Deep View Crew
In today’s newsletter:
🔥 AI for Good: Fighting wildfires with AI-powered early detection
🤖 AI cleaning robots get $800M boost to go subscription-based
⚒️ Reddit launches AI ad tools
🔥 AI for Good: Fighting wildfires with AI-powered early detection
Source: Pano AI
Wildfires are becoming one of the most destructive forces on the planet. In 2024 alone, fires burned nearly one billion acres globally, causing devastating losses to communities, ecosystems and economies. Climate change is making fires more frequent, intense and harder to contain, while traditional detection methods often spot blazes too late.
The challenge: Most wildfire detection still relies on human spotters or lower-resolution satellite data that can miss critical early stages when fires are most containable. By the time smoke is visible to observers, small fires can rapidly explode into massive, uncontrollable infernos.
The solution: Pano AI has deployed AI-powered camera systems across nearly 30 million acres in the U.S., Canada and Australia. The technology uses machine learning to detect smoke plumes in real-time, providing precise coordinates to first responders within minutes of ignition.
Real-world impact: On June 16, 2024, when lightning struck Douglas County, Colorado, Pano AI was the sole source detecting the Bear Creek Fire. The system provided instant coordinates that allowed helicopters to drop 18,000 gallons of water over five hours, containing the blaze to just three acres in a watershed serving over one million people.
"Pano AI gave us early confirmation and precise coordinates that allowed us to launch a rapid aerial and ground attack," said Mike Alexander, director of emergency management for Douglas County Sheriff's Office. "That critical lead time helped us contain the Bear Creek Fire before it became a more destructive event."
The company recently raised $44 million to expand its detection network as wildfire risks continue escalating worldwide.
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🤖 AI cleaning robots get $800M boost to go subscription-based
Source: ChatGPT 4o
Commercial cleaning is evolving far beyond the household Roomba. While consumer robots vacuum living rooms, businesses need industrial-grade machines that can scrub hospital floors, disinfect office spaces and navigate complex environments autonomously. These sophisticated systems dispense cleaning solutions, scrub surfaces edge-to-edge and extract dirty water — capabilities that come with price tags reaching hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The details: Cardinal Robotics has raised $800 million to solve this accessibility problem by offering robots through a subscription model. The company secured funding from 15 banks to cover manufacturing costs upfront, allowing them to lease two- to four-foot-tall robots to businesses for manageable monthly fees instead of requiring massive capital expenditures. Since 2020, Cardinal has distributed 35,000 robots worth roughly $25,000 each, totaling $875 million in deployments.
Co-founder Anand Lalwani told The Information that businesses pay annual interest rates of 3% to 5% on leased robots, with cleaning robots costing as little as $2.99 per hour. The company sources most robots from Chinese manufacturers like Gaussian Robotics and Pudu Robotics, though it's diversifying supply chains due to rising tariffs.
Why it matters: The commercial robotics market is advancing rapidly beyond consumer expectations. Cardinal Robotic’s supplier Gaussian Robotics raised $188 million and another robotics cleaning company, Avidbots, secured a $70 million Series C to deploy industrial systems in airports and hospitals worldwide. These robots use LiDAR mapping to create detailed facility maps and work independently for hours with real-time cloud monitoring.
Cardinal has expanded beyond cleaning through partnerships including a SoftBank joint venture for Australian real estate properties, and now finances other robotics companies like massage robot maker Aescape and delivery bot provider Ottonomy.
Unlike $400 Roombas that randomly bump around furniture using basic sensors, commercial systems coordinate with building management systems and handle specialized tasks like UV disinfection. The robots-as-a-service model reflects growing demand for flexible financing as businesses face labor shortages and rising operational costs.
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The godfather of AI says we’ve already lost control
Zuckerberg doubles down on AI and investors love it
Nvidia stops counting on China as chip rules get tighter
Trump is set to headline an AI energy summit in Pittsburgh
UK universities are catching thousands of students using AI to cheat
New York just passed a bill to stop AI from causing real-world disasters
⚒️ Reddit launches AI ad tools
Source: ChatGPT 4o
Reddit went public in March 2024 with a promise to monetize its vast archive of human conversation. Fifteen months later, the platform is delivering on that vision with new AI advertising tools that mine 22 billion posts and comments for marketing insights—but with a twist that sets it apart from competitors racing toward full automation.
At Cannes Lions this week, Reddit unveiled Community Intelligence, a suite that includes Reddit Insights for analyzing topics and brands across the platform, and Conversation Summary Add-ons that let advertisers showcase positive user sentiment below their ads. Unlike Meta's push toward fully automated ad creation by 2026 or Google's agentic campaign management, Reddit is positioning AI as a tool to surface authentic human conversations rather than replace them.
"Reddit responds so quickly to new products and what's happening in the world," COO Jen Wong told Axios, emphasizing that the AI layer is designed to be "light" and always reveals paths back to actual communities and posts. Early results from Publicis's alpha testing with clients like Hershey and Comcast show Conversation Summary Add-ons delivering 19% higher click-through rates than standard ads.
This strategy arrives as the advertising industry grapples with an authenticity crisis. Only 29% of consumers trust AI-generated information, while 72% struggle to identify authentic content. The competitive landscape reveals dramatically different approaches: Meta's Advantage+ campaigns already generate 15 million AI-created ads monthly with 22% higher ROAS, while TikTok pushes AI-generated video content and LinkedIn reduces campaign creation time from 15 hours to 5 minutes through automation.
Reddit's financial performance since going public validates its differentiated approach. Revenue grew 71% to $428 million in Q4 2024, with daily active users reaching 101.7 million. Crucially, Reddit has achieved two consecutive profitable quarters while diversifying beyond advertising through $203 million in data licensing deals, including partnerships with Google and OpenAI.
The platform's community-first approach capitalizes on growing demand for authenticity. Research shows AI-generated ads with proper disclosure achieve 96% higher trust ratings, while brands positioning themselves as "AI-free" gain differentiation. Reddit offers marketers access to high-intent conversations where users actively seek advice—particularly valuable in categories like health, technology and finance.
The social listening market, valued at $9.15 billion in 2024, faces fragmentation as platforms implement varying AI content policies. Consumer trust continues declining, with Gartner predicting 50% of users will limit social media use by 2025 due to perceived quality decay.
Reddit's strategy represents a shrewd bet on the authenticity premium that's emerging in digital advertising. While competitors pour billions into automation capabilities, Reddit is positioning itself as the antidote to AI content saturation—using AI to surface genuine human insights rather than generate synthetic content.
This approach addresses a fundamental tension in modern advertising: the efficiency gains from AI automation versus the consumer demand for authentic engagement. Meta's path toward full automation may deliver operational efficiencies, but it risks further commoditizing advertising in an environment where consumers already struggle to distinguish real from artificial.
Reddit's competitive advantage lies not in avoiding AI entirely, but in using it strategically to amplify what makes the platform unique—unfiltered human conversation. As platforms invest over $100 billion globally in AI advertising capabilities, Reddit's human-centric approach offers a compelling alternative to the automation arms race.
The success of this strategy will depend on execution quality and whether advertisers ultimately prioritize authentic engagement over operational efficiency. But in an increasingly synthetic digital landscape, Reddit may have found the sweet spot: leveraging AI's analytical power while preserving the authentic human discourse that consumers increasingly crave. In this battle for advertising dollars, genuine conversation might just be the most valuable currency.
Which image is real? |
🤔 Your thought process:
Selected Image 1 (Left):
“The other pic is what I would expect from AI for a "drink case in a 7/11" prompt. The real pic seems more atypical.”
“Weird text on the bottles, and no labels on the shelf in the other image…”
Selected Image 2 (Right):
“Sneaky using a writing system a lot of English-speakers don't recognize! I couldn't tell if it was real or if it was AI nonsense. I should have stuck with my first reaction and picked the other image as the real one.”
“Interesting! the other image has a sign on the front door, that says words in chinese lettering, and the english word "with" in the middle - that seemed like an odd choice to me, so I'd assumed it was AI”
🙏 Thank you
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