Wikimedia, the foundation behind Wikipedia, said the company has added Microsoft, Mistral AI, Perplexity and others as Wikimedia Enterprise partners to join Amazon, Google and Meta. The Wikimedia Enterprise traction highlights how human-driven content carries a premium.
The additional customers of Wikimedia Enterprise highlight the importance of Wikipedia for training large language models. Wikimedia Enterprise provides the datasets of Wikipedia and its sister projects as well as enterprise APIs that include snapshots, on-demand pulls and streaming updates.
Wikimedia Enterprise along with donations and other fundraising supports its human contributors as well as technology infrastructure. The non-profit disclosed the Wikimedia Enterprise customer additions in a blog post outlining its 25th birthday.
Human-driven content has also driven the success of Reddit, which has LLM partnerships with Google and OpenAI. Reddit has become the No. 4 largest web property.
On Reddit's third quarter earnings call, CEO Steven Huffman said the company's LLM relationships are "healthy and collaborative" and mutually improve each other’s products.
Jennifer Wong, Reddit Chief Operating Officer, summed up the importance of human content. "I think Reddit's corpus of information is clearly incredibly valuable and helpful to LLMs because it's human conversation that's fresh, it's authentic. It's just distinctive. There's nothing like it. And we know that LLMs appreciate Reddit's conversation," said Wong.
She added that Reddit is focused on developing its business on its own property. LLMs are a secondary product. "What the marketers are getting is real value from the Reddit platform itself in terms of converting that engagement to real business outcomes for them. It just so happens that, that environment of that conversation is also appreciated by LLMs," said Wong.
