On the occasion of its 25th anniversary, Wikipedia announced the signing of a series of business contracts with leading artificial intelligence companies. Among the platform's new partners are Microsoft, Meta Platforms, Amazon, Perplexity, and the French Mistral AI. This was reported by AP, writes UNN.
Details
The Wikimedia Foundation, which manages the resource, plans to monetize the high demand for its content from AI developers. The agreements will allow tech giants to access the encyclopedia's knowledge base "at a volume and speed specifically designed for their needs." The financial terms of the contracts are not yet disclosed, but it is known that Google became the foundation's first major client back in 2022.
The initiative's goal is to ensure a "fair share" of payments from corporations that use Wikipedia's crowdsourced content to train their generative models.
Wikipedia founder's position
Project founder Jimmy Wales welcomed the use of encyclopedia data to train algorithms, emphasizing the quality of human-verified information. In his opinion, it is better to cooperate with developers than to block them.
I personally am very happy that AI models are trained on Wikipedia data because it is human-curated. I would not want to use AI that is only trained on X, you know, for example, a very angry AI
He emphasized that Wikipedia strives to remain an open space, but companies must compensate for the infrastructure costs they create through aggressive data collection methods.