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 please
However, during an interview with news agency Reuters, he said that the immense traffic generated by AI bots is straining Wikipedia’s resources.