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Wikimedia announced new deals with several artificial intelligence companies in a blog post on Thursday, including Amazon, Meta and Perplexity, as part of the company’s 25th anniversary.
Through the new partnerships under Wikimedia Enterprise, companies will pay Wikipedia to use their data to help develop and train AI models, instead of web scraping.
The partnerships with Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral AI and Perplexity were formalized over the last year but have not been publicly shared, Wikimedia said.
“All these organizations utilize Wikimedia Enterprise to integrate human-governed knowledge into their platforms at scale,” Wikimedia said in the release.
The tech companies joined existing partners Ecosia, Pleias, ProRata and Google, which was one of Wikimedia Enterprise’s first partners in 2022.
“Wikipedia’s knowledge powers generative AI chatbots, search engines, voice assistants and more,” a Wikimedia Foundation spokesperson told CNBC. “The long-term future for AI and tech companies depends on nurturing projects like Wikipedia because it creates the human knowledge they rely on.”
The AI boom has thrown data rights into the spotlight and raised questions and legal issues with the use of human-generated content on sites like Wikipedia and Reddit.
Elon Musk launched ‘Grokipedia’, an AI-powered competitor to Wikipedia, last year.
It was promoted by Musk to be less biased and “anti-woke.” Entries on Grokipedia, named after xAI’s large language model Grok, are all generated by the AI model.
