Wikimedia Enterprise – APIs for LLMs, AI Training, and More

Post by yareal » Wed, May 22, 2024, 5:50 AM UTC

tw04 wrote: post #76

ff317 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over the long term of many years you're /lucky/ if a stable very-low-risk investment can net ~3% when accounting for inflation. Thus $250M could maybe net you roughly $7.5M/year. Exactly how many network links, servers, and engineering staff do you think that buys? It's way under what it operates on today, which is way under what it ideally should be for site like Wikipedia. And that's /just/ the operational engineer…

What are you talking about? The AVERAGE CD right now is 5%. My local CU is almost 6%. US bonds are currently ~4.5% - if you consider those unstable, I guess the US economy isn't stable - and if the US economy crashes, wikipedia will be the least of their or our worries. Wikimedia's expenses are almost ENTIRELY going to staff. Their balance sheet for 2023 included $101m in expenses for salaries and benefits out of a t…

Post by elric » Wed, May 22, 2024, 6:32 AM UTC

schlauerfox wrote: post #43

elric wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CC-BY-SA to be specific. How does attribution of derivative works work in LLMs (etc)? When is the content they produce required to be CC-BY-SA as well (by virtue of the -SA part of the license)?

LLM output can't be copywritten as it's not the work of a human. The company would presumably have to include attribution to every piece of data the system is trained on for every query? Seems absurd, but then how would attribution work? Not really considered when the license was written.

Post by lakomen » Wed, May 22, 2024, 6:54 AM UTC

bawolff wrote: post #80

tw04 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> While i am sympathetic to wmf finding alternative funding streams Why are you sympathetic to it? Their fund, at this point, can make enough off interest on a basic CD to not just pay for every possible cost they could have until the end of time, but make the maintainer(s) obscenely wealthy without breaking a sweat. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/3/3e/Wikim... $250m - they’re doing this out of gre…

This is a rediculous thing to say. You think the interest off 250 million would be enough to run the wikipedia website? Do you have any experience operating web properties at scale to come to this conclusion? Did you base this on anything at all?

Post by bawolff » Wed, May 22, 2024, 7:10 AM UTC

chillydawg wrote: post #94

bawolff wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a rediculous thing to say. You think the interest off 250 million would be enough to run the wikipedia website? Do you have any experience operating web properties at scale to come to this conclusion? Did you base this on anything at all?

the expensive bit of serving big websites is the ads, the tracking, the analytics, the vast internal teams focused on endless avb testing etc. if you boil Wikipedia down it's mostly static pages with a crud editor. it's cached to the moon and back, most pages don't change. the pages are tiny. they're not paying aws for bandwidth.

Post by grape_surgeon » Wed, May 22, 2024, 7:16 AM UTC

elric wrote: post #93

schlauerfox wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLM output can't be copywritten as it's not the work of a human. The company would presumably have to include attribution to every piece of data the system is trained on for every query? Seems absurd, but then how would attribution work? Not really considered when the license was written.

Licenses go beyond copyright though, they tell you what you can and can't do with something someone else made. They're contracts. I'm sure we'll be seeing more lawsuits (and likely new regulation and licenses) around this. Are you saying LLMs are not derivatives of their source material? Why not?