> What is the business model of Wikipedia?

Donations. Have you donated lately?

Wikipedia is cheap compared to creating and training models.

I don’t think donations will suffice at all.

As an example, we had millions of web developers download and install Firebug before browsers shipped their own dev tools. Donations over the course of multiple years would have paid my salary for a month if I were not a volunteer.

But from the “it’s fine” point of view, models will be baked into your OS.

Then later models will be embedded into hardware. Likely only OS makers models.

Ultimately, information is a public good: it is non-excludable (you can’t stop people from using it) and it is non-rival (we can all use it at the same time). Public goods are often very useful, and because they are non-excludable and non-rival, ultimately can’t have a market-based business model. I would class open-weights AI models as public goods, and would support government expenditure to produce them.

Training AI models is capital intensive, though. Unless there's some sort of mega-crowdfunding effort for open weight model training there needs to be a way to recoup that money on the other end. Either that or state sponsorship I guess