- Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales said that people may not trust an encyclopedia "that has a thumb on the scales."
- Wales was referencing Elon Musk's Grokipedia, which the Tesla CEO launched after years of accusing Wikipedia of bias.
- Wales criticized Grokipedia and its reliance on AI-generated entries in an interview with The Verge.
The cofounder of Wikipedia isn't so sure people trust Elon Musk's AI-powered rival, Grokipedia.
Musk launched Grokipedia in October after years of accusing Wikipedia of left-wing bias. In an interview with The Verge, Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales said that he had only looked at Grokipedia "a little."
Asked for his thoughts, Wales referenced some of the backlash to Musk's AI-based encyclopedia.
"I think a lot of the criticism that it's getting is not surprising to me," Wales said.
"I also think in terms of the question of trust, I'm not sure anybody's going to trust an encyclopedia that has a thumb on the scales," he added.
Wales looked to draw a distinction between himself and Musk. When Wales doesn't like something on Wikipedia, he opens a conversation, he said. That compares to Musk, who Wales suggested would likely change things he disagreed with himself.
Musk has a history of getting involved in the details of his companies and making top-down leadership calls. During his Twitter takeover, Musk ordered that the social platform's algorithm prioritize serving his own posts to users more frequently, X employees told "Extremely Hardcore" author Zoe Schiffer, who reported on the development for Platformer.
Wales also pointed to the use of Grok, xAI's large language model, for writing and editing entries.
"I use large language models a lot and I know about the hallucination problem, and I see it all the time," he said. "Large language models really aren't good enough to write an encyclopedia."
Wikipedia, which undoubtedly is looking to prevent its users from switching to a rival like Grokipedia, allows itself to be scraped by AI bots. Some Grokipedia pages are almost identical to the Wikipedia entries, users have found.
Wales referenced reports that Grokipedia's entries "agree with Elon Musk's political views." Business Insider identified key political differences between the two encyclopedias, particularly on topics such as the January 6 Capitol Riots and the 2014 Gamergate controversy.
"It's Elon, but that might not be what we all want from an encyclopedia," Wales said.
Accusations of left-wing bias have long been leveled against Wikipedia — including by Wales' cofounder. Larry Sanger left the online encyclopedia in 2002. Since then, he's called it "badly biased" and captured by "liberals and leftists." (Wales previously told podcaster Lex Fridman that Sanger "doesn't get enough credit" for Wikipedia, but suggested "cofounder's not the right title" for his contributions.)
Musk has big ambitions for Grokipedia. In November, Musk called the encyclopedia the "modern-day Library of Alexandria," and said that he wanted to eventually send it to deep space.
The site seems to be growing. Since November, Grokipedia shifted from "v0.1" to "v0.2." Its total article count grew to 1,089,057, up from the 885,279 it had when it launched.
Wikipedia, in comparison, has over 7 million articles.
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