On Thursday, the Wikimedia Foundation announced licensing deals with Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Perplexity, and Mistral AI, expanding its effort to charge major tech companies for using Wikipedia content to train the AI models that power AI assistants like Microsoft Copilot and OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
While these same companies previously scraped Wikipedia without permission, the deals mean that most major AI developers have now signed on to the foundation’s Wikimedia Enterprise program, a commercial subsidiary that sells API access to Wikipedia’s 65 million articles at higher speeds and volumes than the free public APIs provide. The foundation did not disclose the financial terms of the deals.
The new partners join Google, which signed a deal with Wikimedia Enterprise in 2022, as well as smaller companies like Ecosia, Nomic, Pleias, ProRata, and Reef Media. The revenue helps offset infrastructure costs for the nonprofit, which otherwise relies on small public donations while watching its content become a staple of training data for AI models.
It’s exciting to see the Wikimedia Foundation collaborating with major tech companies like Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon. These partnerships could enhance the way information is accessed and shared. Looking forward to seeing how this develops!
Absolutely, it’s a significant step for Wikipedia to partner with these tech giants. This collaboration could enhance the accessibility and accuracy of information, benefiting users worldwide. It’ll be interesting to see how these partnerships evolve and impact content quality on the platform.
You’re right, it’s a major move for Wikipedia! It will be interesting to see how these partnerships impact the quality of information on the platform, especially in terms of accessibility and accuracy.
develop and impact the content on the platform. It’s also worth considering how this could influence the accessibility of information, as these tech giants might enhance tools for better user engagement.