Elon Musk, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales is not pleased with your Wikipedia rival; says: Pretty skeptical of …
Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has expressed strong doubts about Elon Musk’s AI-powered encyclopedia competitor Grokipedia, citing concerns about artificial intelligence’s ability to produce reliable encyclopedic content and calling on “right-leaning billionaires” to fund quality journalism instead. In a recent interview, Wales addressed both the persistent conservative criticism of Wikipedia’s alleged liberal bias and the emerging threat from Musk’s AI-driven alternative.When asked whether he views Grokipedia as a competitor, Wales acknowledged the challenge while expressing significant reservations about its AI-driven approach.
“Clearly it is. Whether it’s an important or meaningful competitor, remains to be seen,” Wales told news agency Reuters.“I’m pretty skeptical of the ability of large language models to produce encyclopedic content, because the hallucination problem is still quite bad. That is even more true the more obscure the topic,” he added.The “hallucination problem” refers to AI’s tendency to generate false or fabricated information presented as fact. This is a challenge in large language models that threatens the reliability of AI-generated encyclopedic content, particularly on lesser-known subjects.
Wikipedia co-founder Wales ‘challenges conservative billionaires’
Addressing criticism that Wikipedia relies too heavily on what some conservatives describe as “the liberal woke establishment” in its sourcing, Wales criticised the ‘right-leaning wealthy individuals’.“There are a plethora of low-quality, very populist right-wing outlets that just aren’t good enough. And that’s unfortunate,” Wales said.“If any right-leaning billionaires want to do something good for the world, fund some really intellectual work, fund some high-quality news outlets that aren’t populist, that really care about journalistic values. That would be fantastic,” he added.Wales recently called on companies like Google and OpenAI to pay for using the encyclopedia’s content to train their large language models (LLMs). Wales said that the current situation is unfair to Wikipedia’s donors who support the platform’s infrastructure costs.
