Wikipedia Launches Paid API for AI Companies to Boost Revenue

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0:44Terms apply. So you probably haven't been on Wikipedia in a while. They used to, every time you open it, ask you for money. I remember that being sort of annoying. Well, now they're asking AI companies to give them money because they are sick of AI using, crawling their pages for training data. They want them to use their API. So today we're going to talk about that and some of the debate there. But before we do, Jayden, why don't you tell them about our school community? Yeah, every single week we record a bonus piece of content that we just put on our school community. And basically it's what Jamie and I are personally doing to grow and scale our businesses using AI tools.

1:18And we are running a Black Friday discount for$19 a month. Usually it's much more,$20,$25 a month, or we've done it$100 a month in the past. So like it goes up in price. And if you want to get it locked in at$19 a month, you can do that now. There's a link in the description. Whenever we raised on you, Black Friday discount. This week, we just shared a video, Jamie breaking down how he built a tool completely like a lead gen tool, including AI integrations in the back end, front end, using a really impressive piece of AI software. If you want to check that out, the tutorial on what he's personally building and how he did it, go check out the link in the description to the AI Hustle School community.

1:57And you can see that amongst like over 60 other videos that are on there. All right, let's get into what's happening with Wikipedia. This is kind of funny. So essentially, Wikipedia has been like we all have known and loved it for a very long time. I feel like it's becoming a little bit irrelevant in the day of AI. And I think like maybe there's there's a couple different sides to it. There's kind of like chat GPT replacing it in a sense that I don't really go to Wikipedia when I want to learn something anymore, I would just go to chat GPT. It's not like Wikipedia is like a encyclopedia that was written by like professors, although Wikipedia probably does have a lot of like great professors and people that contribute to it.

2:37But because the lack of transparency, I don't really know who's editing the pages. It just has this level of like, I sort of trust what's generally said on there. But also like you never really know because anyone could edit it. So that's like the feeling I get. And for some reason, even though AI models can hallucinate, I feel like AI is, it just feels more trustworthy. One of the reasons being all AI models look at Wikipedia. They have it in their training software, along with like 100 or 1 ,000 or a million other websites on the same topic. And they can kind of triangulate the most popular talking points or opinions on things.

3:10And then that's kind of what you're getting spit out to you. So it feels like AI is a little bit more trustworthy because of that. Wikipedia said that they have seen a 8 % decline year over year in human page views, but the page views are growing, but it's only because AI and they're not actually like AI obviously doesn't donate to Wikipedia. And so they're trying to actually monetize and make money off of this. Jamie, when was the last time you used Wikipedia? It's been a very, very long time. Can't even remember. I would say at least eight years probably. So wow. Yeah. I mean, I do the same thing now you know it's so much faster just to ask um chat gpt or even google now with their ai summary uh if you have if you have a research related question or something like that so you know i i can see their i mean what are your thoughts on the the crawling versus using their api because that i mean i i could see their frustration but um you know how do they go about this in a way that uh is ethical or at least that can save their company i don't even know how how they stay afloat now, honestly.

4:16But so it's interesting. I just went to their website now. And of course, like you mentioned, there's a giant pop up that takes up like a huge chunk of my screen that says donate now. I can't remember like the numbers, but I remember seeing them recently on like the amount of money that they raise from donations and how much of that is actually needed to run the organization. It is a very small percentage. So it's actually a very profitable company. Like it makes a lot of money from these things. I don't know who's donating today. I don't know how much money they make from it, but they do run very aggressive donation campaigns.

4:46Very like when you go to a Wikipedia page, it's, you know, at the top of the article, there's usually like this huge thing that's like, please donate, you know, without you, the lights will go out at Wikipedia. I know that Google very heavily indexes Wikipedia. And so it's like, obviously a very big, it's, it's very drives a ton of traffic from that. What I do think is interesting in regards to it though is a lot of people have criticized it um okay yeah i'm on it right now and i clicked on a page and then all of a sudden just this huge banner pops up at the top of the page where it's like wikipedia was just a dream and then it has just like this massive ad um and on the side it's like how often would you like to donate once monthly annual like would you the preferred amount is 20 25 if you do monthly you can donate 500 monthly to wikipedia anyways whatever.

5:37So I know this, this kind of like bothers people, but I guess if it's free, like you can't complain and you can exit out the ads. But one thing that I will say is interesting is they've got a lot of criticism recently for being like, quote unquote, woke. I think Elon Musk is the one that like levied this criticism of them. And essentially the criticism is that their organization is left leaning, like I think most tech companies these days, like most of the employees there and that that they leverage that left leaning ideology to influence the content on Wikipedia. I think Elon Musk calls it Wikipedia, right?

6:14So you kind of have whether it's true or not, you have this like sentiment that a lot of people are amplifying online. And because of that, I think it just adds another layer of like, like, even if you were like, no, that's absolutely not true, right? Like, let's say that's your opinion, probably the Wikipedia. oh, I will say one other data point for that, but the Wikipedia like board of directors and stuff and the CEO, I'm sure they're like, no, that's absolutely not true. But the problem is because anyone can edit it, it's impossible to prove that, right? Anyone really could go and edit Wikipedia and put sort of ideologies in it.

6:44So Elon Musk has come up with a solution to it that I think is interesting. Made, I don't know if you saw it, Jamie, did you ever hear about Grokipedia? I did hear, I haven't looked it up, but I've heard about it. That's funny. Okay. I haven't actually used it, but I was just looking at a page on Wikipedia, which was like a new cyclone kind of thing that like so it's kind of a recent event i'm gonna try typing it in okay so it doesn't really look like i could be wrong but it doesn't really look like grokipedia does um like super recent events it's more like a it's not just like you're asking chat shift it's actually looks like static pages that were generated anyways they've apparently went and remade like most of wikipedia although not not recent events just like the old pages and they've created like pages for for like everything.

7:30So that's kind of interesting. And while I don't know if I don't like I haven't really dug too much into the arguments over whether Wikipedia is super woke or not. I will say I saw an interview where one of the founders of Wikipedia said that that was the case. And he I think he he like gave a list of like websites that can't be sourced on Wikipedia. Fox News apparently can't be a source on Wikipedia, but CNN could. And he's like, that's biased. So like I've seen some things like that. In any case, regardless of like the political side of it, I do think like an AI generating the entire website, I actually am sort of in favor.

8:02And maybe you want to go like have a real person manually like review stuff, perhaps. But like, I very like I just feel like even if it was chat GPT, which I know is like left leaning or whatever, the employees at OpenAI or in Silicon Valley and Sam Altman is pretty public about that. But like, even if it was OpenAI in chat GPT, I feel like I'd still trust like a chat GPT Wikipedia more than random people Wikipedia, which I know probably sounds countering. intuitive to trust the AI, but that's sort of where I fall on it. So I think it's kind of an interesting point where people are, there's like AI hallucinations, but then there's like, but you don't want like a human bias in it.

8:35So it's kind of interesting. Yeah. I mean, AI has the ability to cross-reference different information too. So, you know, instead of you having to go research Wikipedia and then another news source that can do both for you. So I would agree with that. I would think I would trust an AI search result better than Wikipedia in some circumstances. I have a question. Do you think, so like if, you know, AI is crawling Wikipedia all the time. If Wikipedia were to disappear, is that data stored somewhere else now that AI has like basically gone over all of it? Yeah. So I think it's a good question. Yes.

9:09Like I have a, basically I have a friend and he's got like a thumb drive with all the data of Wikipedia downloaded on his thumb drive from like maybe like five years ago or something whenever he did this because someone went and crawled it five years ago and then just made a big data set online where you can get it. The one thing that's valuable about this and why companies like Reddit and Wikipedia can try to get these APIs where they keep selling it is like I was showing at the beginning of the episode, I was over on a page called Typhoon Kalameji, which is like a recent typhoon that happened in just, you know, October 31st, it dissipated November 7th.

9:40So it's like, just like, you know, a few days ago is when it dissipated. And they have a whole Wikipedia article all about it already written up. So different people have probably contributed to this, you know, so so like the ongoing growth of the platform, I think, is where it is valuable. And I went and typed this typhoon into, you know, Grokipedia and it didn't exist yet because Grokipedia was kind of like is more static. It was kind of like made with everything that was probably used to be on Wikipedia or generally on the Internet, but not so much like breaking news. Now, I think you basically can replace this with something like perplexity, which I use all the time, and it will give you like a real time breakdown of like current events.

10:17And so I think if like, quote unquote, Rockipedia or OpenAI or anyone else that wants to do that, if they just did something like perplexity that would also search for news articles and like compile pages, I think that that would be basically just as good. I don't think Wikipedia will ever disappear, but I think they'll have to change the model. And I think that's what they are trying to do right now. One thing that I do think is interesting. So I've asked, you know, AI companies to use their API. I think it's very reasonable. And I think, you know, like companies should, especially when it's like OpenAI or XAI or Anthropik, these big Google Gemini, like these big multi-billion dollar companies.

10:51I don't expect small startups to really listen to that per se for better or for worse. Other budgets are smaller. But like if you have, if you're a big company and you're already paying like data center or like data deals, I think you should, I think you should pay for the API of Wikipedia. If nothing else, it's going to like make you seem like a more responsible, mature company and get you in the public good graces. But one thing that's interesting is Wikipedia is not like it's like their guideline, but they're not threatening to like sue anyone that doesn't. And it's kind of at a tricky place for Wikipedia because it's not like Wikipedia paid anyone to go and write this content.

11:24It's all free volunteers that made it. So Wikipedia doesn't really feel like they can, like they have a paid API tier, but they can't really force you to use it because like it's not really their content and that's not really how they built the company to begin with, you know? Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. The whole thing is fascinating to me. I think it's, yeah, to think about that, random people entered all the information originally, and now they don't want people to pay for it. I don't know. It's funny. But, hey, if you enjoyed this episode, be sure to leave us a rating or review wherever you're listening.

11:56We really appreciate those, and they help us reach more people. And be sure to check out the AI Hustle School Committee if you are interested in growing your business and or making money on the side using AI. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time. oh i have had no luck lately wait lady look britski i got you i've had so much luck on spinquest.com they have all of my favorite games slot games live blackjack craps and bubble craps you can even get a 30 coin pack for just 10 bucks 10 bucks for 30 i'm headed over to spinquest.com right now spinquest is a free to play social casino void where prohibited visit spinquest.com for more details This episode sponsored by Ridwell.

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