In a blog post released on Thursday, as part of the 25th anniversary of the company, Wikimedia announced new partnerships with various artificial intelligence firms that include Amazon, Meta, and Perplexity.
Wikimedia Enterprise will also enable companies to pay Wikipedia to use its data to assist in training and developing AI models, rather than web scraping, through the new partnerships.
Wikimedia said that the collaborations with Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral AI, and Perplexity were formalized in the past year but have not been disclosed publicly.
In the press release, Wikimedia stated that “All these organizations utilize Wikimedia Enterprise to integrate human-governed knowledge into their platforms at scale.”
However, the tech companies joined existing partners, including Ecosia, Pleias, ProRata, and Google, which was one of Wikimedia Enterprise’s first partners in 2022.
A Wikimedia Foundation spokesperson informed CNBC that “Wikipedia’s knowledge powers generative AI chatbots, search engines, voice assistants, and more. 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 brought the issue of data rights into the limelight and raised legal concerns about the usage of human-generated content on websites such as Wikipedia and Reddit.
Elon Musk introduced ’Grokipedia,′ an AI-powered competitor to Wikipedia, the previous year. Musk encouraged it to be less biased and “anti-woke.” The Grok Wikipedia, named after the xAI large language model Grok, is entirely generated by the artificial intelligence model.
