tech
Wikipedia will share content with AI firms in new licensing deals
Wikimedia Enterprise signs Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Perplexity, and Mistral AI to paid deals.
TL;DR
- Wikimedia Foundation announced licensing deals with Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Perplexity, and Mistral AI.
- The deals allow these companies to use Wikipedia content for training AI models.
- These companies previously scraped Wikipedia content without permission.
- The Wikimedia Enterprise program sells API access to Wikipedia's articles at higher speeds and volumes.
- Revenue from these deals helps offset the nonprofit's infrastructure costs.
- AI companies' extensive use of Wikipedia content has led to rising infrastructure costs and bandwidth usage.
- Human traffic to Wikipedia has declined as automated scrapers evaded detection.
- The decline in traffic threatens the feedback loop that sustains Wikipedia.
- Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales supports AI models training on Wikipedia data but emphasizes the need for financial contribution.