Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is brushing off Elon Musk's AI-powered Grokipedia challenge, arguing that large language models are fundamentally unfit to create reliable encyclopedic content. Speaking at CNBC's Technology Executive Council Summit, Wales dismissed Musk's claims of Wikipedia bias while highlighting critical flaws in AI-generated information that could undermine public trust in digital knowledge sources.
Elon Musk's latest venture into content creation hit immediate skepticism from an unexpected source - the very platform he's trying to replace. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales didn't mince words about Grokipedia during Tuesday's CNBC Technology Executive Council Summit in New York, delivering a pointed critique that cuts to the heart of AI's reliability crisis.
"I'm not optimistic he will create anything very useful right now," Wales told the audience, dismissing Musk's AI-powered Wikipedia alternative before even examining its output. The comment comes as Grokipedia struggles through what Wales called a "rocky start" in its public debut.
Wales' skepticism isn't personal - it's technical. The Wikipedia founder has spent years watching large language models fail at the very task Grokipedia claims to master. "The LLMs he is using to write it are going to make massive errors," Wales explained. "We know ChatGPT and all the other LLMs are not good enough to write wiki entries."
The economic disparity between the two approaches is staggering. Wales estimates Wikipedia's annual technology costs at just $175 million, while Wall Street projects AI hyperscalers will spend $550 billion next year alone. Yet despite this massive investment gap, Wales argues the AI approach fundamentally misunderstands the problem it's trying to solve.
To prove his point, Wales shared real-world examples of LLM failures that expose the technology's core weaknesses. When he tests new chatbots by asking about his wife - "not famous but known" from British politics - the results are consistently "plausible but wrong." The pattern reveals how LLMs create convincing fiction when pressed for specific details.
Even more damaging was Wales' account of a German Wikipedia community member who discovered systematic citation errors. The volunteer wrote a program to verify ISBN numbers in book references and traced multiple fake citations back to a single contributor. That person eventually confessed to using ChatGPT for research - and the AI "just very happily makes up books for you," Wales noted.
The bias accusations that motivated Musk's Grokipedia launch drew particular fire from Wales. "He is mistaken about that," Wales said of Musk's "woke bias" claims. "His complaints about Wiki are that we focus on mainstream sources and I am completely unapologetic about that. We don't treat random crackpots the same as The New England Journal of Medicine and that doesn't make us woke."
