"As part of Wikipedia's 25th anniversary, parent company Wikimedia a slew of partnerships with AI-focused companies like Amazon, Meta, Perplexity, Microsoft and others. The deals are meant to alleviate some of the cost associated with AI chatbots accessing Wikipedia content in enormous volumes by giving the tech companies streamlined access. As noted by , the timeline on these deals is a little squirrely."
"The organization sounded the alarm on this issue last year, saying the reduction in traffic due to LLMs and AI summaries could prove existential for the nonprofit and the world's largest online encyclopedia. Wikipedia's 65 million free articles have served as rich training data for AI chatbots, but all that scraping has driven up server costs at the organization. Wikimedia had been hoping to move these large firms over to its enterprise platform to help with costs."
Wikimedia reached paid partnerships with major AI-focused companies to provide high-throughput API access to Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. The partnerships aim to reduce the infrastructure burden caused by large-scale scraping and to generate revenue to offset rising server costs. Wikipedia's 65 million articles have served as training data for AI chatbots, and reduced direct traffic plus heavy API usage risked financial strain for the nonprofit. Wikimedia developed an enterprise platform offering features and functionality to transition large firms from free access to commercial access, with companies gaining streamlined API feeds to supply chatbot systems with content from Wikimedia projects.
Read at Engadget
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