Reddit Co-Founder Alexis Ohanian: Social Media Apps Are No Longer Cool, AI Agents Will Reshape the Internet

Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian told the inaugural WIRED World Fair that building conventional social-media applications is "not cool anymore." He argues the open web has been compromised by bots and AI-generated slop, and he expects the next wave of user-generated content to resemble evolved group chats rather than public feeds.

Why it matters for GPU / AI infrastructure

The shift Ohanian describes has direct implications for AI compute demand. Reddit's vast corpus of human conversations has become a prized training dataset for large language models, driving licensing deals with Google and OpenAI. At the same time, AI-powered search is diverting referral traffic — Reddit shares fell 29% after the platform warned of this impact — while scraping pressures force platforms toward authentication walls that reshape data pipelines.

Ohanian, now managing $1.3 billion at Seven Seven Six, backs the "Dead Internet Theory": most online activity is already synthetic. He predicts interfaces will increasingly be built for agents, not people, accelerating the need for high-throughput, low-latency inference infrastructure that can serve machine-to-machine interactions at scale.

Despite concerns about manipulation and commercialization degrading discourse, Ohanian remains optimistic about AI's potential in medicine and science. His early investment in Anthropic reflects a belief that responsible model development can coexist with the infrastructure build-out required to support an agent-first internet.