Wikipedia has signed training deals with a host of major AI companies, helping it recoup some of the exorbitant costs it accrued from being relentlessly pillaged by data scrapers.
The companies include Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Perplexity, and France’s Mistral AI. As part of the series of licensing deals, revealed Thursday by Wikipedia’s operator the Wikimedia Foundation, the AI developers are joining Wikimedia’s Enterprise program, which provides direct access to its collection of over 65 million articles.
Using Wikipedia and its contents is of course free, but the official program allows quicker access at a “volume and speed designed specifically” for “large-scale reusers and distributors,” like AI chatbots.
Wikipedia had already agreed a licensing deal with Google in 2022, and also signed deals with smaller AI firms like the search engine Ecosia. Now, with the new slew of deals, Wikipedia has partnered up with every big name in town, and it sees the commercial partnerships as a way to keep the lights on, though it didn’t provide specifics on the financials of the deals.
“Wikipedia is a critical component of these tech companies’ work that they need to figure out how to support financially,” Lane Becker, president of Wikimedia Enterprise, told Reuters.
“It took us a little while to understand the right set of features and functionality to offer if we’re going to move these companies from our free platform to a commercial platform… but all our Big Tech partners really see the need for them to commit to sustaining Wikipedia’s work.”
It’s an interesting direction for the nonprofit, which has faced its fair share of struggle over AI’s increasing stranglehold over the internet. AI companies heavily relied on free sources of information like Wikipedia to train their AI models in the first place, and continue to frequently cite the encyclopedia for their responses. But as more people turn to chatbots for answers, fewer are visiting Wikipedia, which relies on small donations to stay afloat, and non-paid volunteers to maintain its articles.
Moreover, the large-scale data scraping of Wikipedia by AI web crawlers placed a heavy toll on its servers, which are growing more expensive to maintain. In effect, Wikipedia was paying for the AI industry’s voracious training — which isn’t what its readers were donating money for, says Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.
“They’re not donating in order to subsidize these huge AI companies,” Wales told the Associated Press. The donors are saying, “You know what, actually you can’t just smash our website. You have to sort of come in the right way.”
There’s another reason Wales is onboard with the partnerships: better us than less scrupulous sources.
“I’m very happy personally that AI models are training on Wikipedia data because it’s human…
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