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WIKI BIRTHDAY TO YOU

As Wikipedia turns 25, its future will depend on AI — for better or worse

The online encyclopedia is celebrating 25 years since launch, but its next quarter century will likely be defined by the AI giants it’s now signing content deals with.

Millie Giles

1/15/26 12:19PM

January 15 is known to dedicated “Wikipedians” — among them, presumably, many of the ~250,000 volunteers that write and edit the site’s ~65 million articles across more than 300 languages — as Wikipedia Day.

On this day in 2001, cofounder Jimmy Wales first wrote “Hello, World!” onto a blank web page that would soon become one of the world’s most popular websites for the next 2.5 decades — ballooning with knowledge, citations, and backlinks provided for free (as always) by scores of contributors.

This year, though, with Wikipedia looking toward a mounting tech superpower that could pose its biggest existential threat to date, the online encyclopedia might want to turn to its own “quarter-life crisis” page.

This article has been skimmed through by AI

On Thursday, Wikimedia Foundation, the site’s nonprofit operator, announced partnerships with several Big Tech giants — including Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Perplexity, and Mistral AI — that will see the companies pay to use Wikipedia’s vast collection of articles to train their AI models.

As reported by The Verge, these deals are part of the Wikimedia Enterprise program, which was launched in 2021 to allow companies to use a premium version of Wikipedia’s content library for a fee. According to Wikimedia, many of the listed companies joined the program over the past year, or even before that — meaning that the site has actually been helping to grow the AI tech that threatens to supersede it.

Wikipedia at 25 - site views — Sherwood News

Looking at Wikipedia’s site visits, the past 20 months in a row have seen total page views slump behind figures recorded for the year prior — coinciding, perhaps not so coincidentally, with the dizzying rise of AI chatbots. Indeed, traffic was down 9% year over year in April, the same month that visits to ChatGPT officially overtook visits to Wikipedia.

Like Stack Overflow, Wikipedia is now caught up in tech’s circular coal mine, where the companies that feed on the platform’s information trove might ultimately end up being the ones that replace it. Still, Wales seemed rosy enough about the situation, telling the Associated Press, “I’m very happy personally that AI models are training on Wikipedia data because it’s human curated.”

Jon Keegan8h

FT: Meta considering “tens of billions” in new capital to fund AI

Just days after Google announced a monster $85 billion upsized equity raise, the extremely profitable Meta is seeking to sell “tens of billions of dollars” in stock, according to a new report from the Financial Times.

Meta is planning on spending between $125 billion and $145 billion on AI capital expenditure this year alone.

Shares dropped more than 5% on the news.

Meta weighs big equity raising after blockbuster Google deal

Rani Molla

14h

Meta is supercharging its subscription businesses

The free-app giant never really cared about recurring revenue. Now, it’s launching paid plans for all sorts of stuff.

Jon Keegan14h

FT: Anthropic staff helping the NSA use Mythos for offensive cyberattacks

Anthropic’s Mythos AI model was deemed too dangerous to release to the public, with the company citing its ability to orchestrate novel cyberattacks.

And that’s just what the National Security Agency is doing, with the help of Anthropic staff embedded at the agency, according to a report from the Financial Times.

Only a small number of companies and US allies have been given access to the advanced model, which means America’s adversaries have not had the chance to shore up their defenses against the AI model’s new offensive capabilities.

The arrangement is especially unusual as the Pentagon has deemed Anthropic’s AI a national security supply chain risk — effectively blacklisting it for defense work — in response to the company’s refusal to allow its technology to be used for any legal application, which could include autonomous killing or mass surveillance. Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the determination.

US National Security Agency using Anthropic’s Mythos for cyber attacks

Rani Molla15h

Longtime Tesla bear JPMorgan upgraded Tesla and raised its price target to $475 from $145

For more than a decade, JPMorgan was Wall Street’s most stubborn Tesla skeptic, anchored by auto analyst Ryan Brinkman’s strict focus on traditional car fundamentals and near-term delivery numbers.

But JPM recently handed coverage of the stock to a new analyst, Rajat Gupta, who is throwing that playbook out the window. In a note Friday, the firm upgraded Tesla to “neutral” from “underweight” and raised its price target 228% to $475 from $145. (The analyst consensus on FactSet is $403.) Instead of focusing on the company’s struggling vehicle business, the new analyst is orienting himself more toward Tesla’s idea of the future, now modeling Tesla’s physical AI and robotaxi fleets all the way out to the year 2040.

Here are the main reasons for the capitulation:

Looking past the car lot: Gupta argues that Tesla “is at the forefront of physical AI, entering uncharted TAMs” and therefore “deserves the benefit of the doubt to be valued on LT earnings potential” rather than near-term speed bumps.
Unmatched vertical integration: Tesla’s control over everything from battery cells to custom silicon gives it a massive moat. JPM notes this starting point advantage is “unmatched at an industrial level scale” and “still somewhat under-appreciated and misunderstood.”
The AWS flywheel effect: Deploying Optimus robots inside its own factories “should not only lower COGS for the base automotive business, but more importantly, help validate the product at an industrial scale.” Gupta called it “a classic flywheel effect, somewhat analogous to AWS and Kiva at AMZN.”

For Tesla bulls who have argued for years that this is an AI company and not a carmaker, JPM’s sudden $3.9 trillion valuation model is the ultimate validation.

Anthropic ponders self-improving AI

Anthropic says Claude already writes 80% of its code. A new post asks what happens when the models can improve themselves — and whether anyone could stop them.

Jon Keegan15h