Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales to Google, OpenAI and other AI companies: ‘Pay us for training AI, it’s not…’
Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, has called on companies like Google and OpenAI to pay for using the encyclopedia’s content to train their large language models (LLMs). Wales argued that the current situation is unfair to Wikipedia’s donors who support the platform’s infrastructure costs. Wales suggested that Wikipedia’s content is a massive part of the training data for all major LLMs. He said that all content is freely licensed for people to use as they pleaseHowever, during an interview with news agency Reuters, he said that the immense traffic generated by AI bots is straining Wikipedia’s resources.“Yeah we’re a big part of the training data for all the major LLMs. Everything in Wikipedia is freely licensed for people to do as they please with it,” Wales told the news agency, adding, “We do see that on a more practical level, the AI bots crawling Wikipedia are imposing quite a lot of costs on us.”
Tech companies should cover technical cost
During the interview, Wales explained the financial logic behind his demand for payment. He noted that the technical cost of serving data to AI companies should be covered by the tech companies working on AI.“We’re trying to say, you should use our enterprise product and pay us for your usage,” Wales said.He emphasised that Wikipedia, a non-profit organisation, is funded entirely by public donations. Spending that money to support the infrastructure demands of for-profit tech giants is unsustainable.“It’s not really fair to our donors if people are donating to support Wikipedia, but then we’re spending our money to support OpenAI and Google and stuff like that,” he added.When asked why Wikipedia does not simply put a hard stop to the AI companies’ usage, Wales admitted that while it is a possibility, it is a complex decision. “I’ve heard some rumblings,” he noted.
