EDA Summary

Executive Summary

In our initial exploration, we analyzed three key Reddit communities: r/technology, r/Futurology, and r/news. Since our main focus was on technology, especially with the rise of AI tools like ChatGPT and Google Bard, we wanted to understand who drives the conversation in these communities. We investigated whether a few individuals dominate discussions or if participation is more diverse. Our findings revealed that while some individuals tend to lead discussions in r/technology, participation is more evenly spread out in the comment sections.

Next, we examined discussion volumes in these communities to see if major tech events influence activity levels. Using OpenAI as an example, we plotted time-series data and observed fluctuations in discussion volume, particularly around significant tech advancements. However, we found r/technology to have more and more meaningful content compared to r/Futurology, leading us to focus our analysis on the former.

Moving forward, as we aim to explore the relationship between sentiment scores and stock prices, we analyzed the stock fluctuations of top tech corporations, including Microsoft, Nvidia, Adobe, Alphabet, and Amazon, from Jan 2021 to February 2023. We also marked significant ChatGPT events to assess their impact on stock prices. Overall, we observed a general decrease or stability in stock prices following OpenAI’s research, with slight increases after ChatGPT’s introduction, though these changes are influenced by multiple factors.

Shifting our attention to r/news, we identified keywords related to technology themes and filtered news articles accordingly. We discovered that the majority of news articles focused on AI, prompting further investigation into specific tech products in the subsequent NLP analysis.

Lastly, we analyzed how technology-related news evolves over time and whether major events have a significant impact. Our findings indicate that while the introduction of ChatGPT has sustained engagement in discussions, it has also led to an increase in the reporting of technology-related news articles.