"Wikipedia Sells AI Access to Tech Giants, Finally Finds Way to Make Money Besides Those Guilt-Trip Banners"

Wikimedia, the parent company of Wikipedia, has announced new partnerships with several artificial intelligence companies, including Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral AI, and Perplexity, as part of its 25th anniversary celebrations. These partnerships, which were formalized over the last year, are part of the company's Wikimedia Enterprise initiative, which allows companies to pay for access to Wikipedia's API to develop and train AI models, rather than relying on web scraping. The collaborations, which also include existing partners such as Google, Ecosia, Pleias, and ProRata, aim to integrate human-governed knowledge into AI platforms at scale, with a Wikimedia Foundation spokesperson noting that "Wikipedia's knowledge powers generative AI chatbots, search engines, voice assistants and more." The partnerships come at a time when the AI boom has raised questions about data rights and the use of human-generated content, with Elon Musk recently launching an AI-powered competitor to Wikipedia called Grokipedia, which uses a large language model to generate entries. By partnering with these companies, Wikimedia aims to ensure that its human-generated content is used in a responsible and sustainable way, with the long-term goal of nurturing projects like Wikipedia that create the human knowledge that AI companies rely on, as stated by the Wikimedia Foundation spokesperson, "the long-term future for AI and tech companies depends on nurturing projects like Wikipedia because it creates the human knowledge they rely on."