Remember that Elon overpromises & underdelivers
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales isn’t worried about Elon Musk’s Grokipedia: ‘Not optimistic he will create anything very useful right now’
Submitted 2 weeks ago by RegularJoe@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/28/elon-musk-grokipedia-wikipedia-founder-jimmy-wales.html
Comments
biotin7@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
AlecSadler@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
Literally. With everything. In every business he touches. Yet the stock goes up. It’s stupid.
MrScottyTay@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Hmm it seems the speculative market loves speculation rather than actual results…
phoenixz@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Not really.
Remember that Elmo just lies his ass off almost all the time.
Over promises and under delivery are such extreme understatements with him, almost everything bhe says is just pure imaginary bullshit
biotin7@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
Speaking of SpaceX, ISRO was able to come up with a design of a Reusable-launch vehicle in half the price & did it way before them
SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Hyperloop, Neuralink, Tesla Semi, FSD, Mars lander, Roadster, Boring company…But we sent Elizabeth Holmes to jail.
pyre@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
nah most of the time he just overpromises… rarely has he delivered anything at all, and when he does it’s such a clusterfuck that underdeliver feels super generous.
DarrinBrunner@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Musk is just Nazi-washing what he stole from Wikipedia, he doesn’t have the base of volunteers and employees to maintain his latest toy. A year from now, it will be gone and forgotten, and we’ll all be shouting at each other to go vote.
fonix232@fedia.io 2 weeks ago
Guess Conservapedia wasn't conservative enough.
gedaliyah@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
No, they already have Metapedia for that.
kibiz0r@midwest.social 2 weeks ago
Jimmy Wales: Libertarian that ended up creating perhaps the most successful collectivist project of all time.
thisbenzingring@lemmy.sdf.org 2 weeks ago
this is a perfect example of why we should always allow an escape space for everyone. Sometimes that person in the space you are polar opposed too will create something that defies even their own rules
snowboardbumvt@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
In what way does Wikipedia defy Jimmy Wales own rules?
antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
Lemmy itself is a good example of this. Most of the userbase heavily disagrees with the main developers’ political opinions, yet the software works well for everyone.
MrMakabar@slrpnk.net 2 weeks ago
Reading his Wiki page, he does sound rather reasonable. Support for Occupy Wallstreet, running as a UK Labour candidate, openly calling not to elect Trump and also calling the US Libertarian Party “lunatics”.
DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social 2 weeks ago
British libertarians get a pass on account of living in a monarchy but if you want to know why Labour’s shitting the bed, well, they let a right wing libertarian run
antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
He also gave the example of a German Wiki community member who wrote a program to verify the ISBN numbers of books cited, and was able to trace notable mistakes to one person. That person ultimately confessed they had used ChatGPT to find citations for text references and the LLM “just very happily makes up books for you,” Wales said.
Well this won’t be a problem with Grokipedia, because it only uses sources that are available online as pure text (I’m pretty sure not even PDFs are used by it).
Wales thinks the public and the media often give Wikipedia too much credit. In its early days, he says, the site was never as bad as the jokes made about it. But now, he says, “We are not as good as they think we are. Of course, we are a lot better than we used to be, but there is still so much work to do.”
Amen, it’s nice to see the level-headedness.
koshka@koshka.ynh.fr 2 weeks ago
It’s going to become an AI written clone of Wikipedia with all the personal opinions of Elon mixed in. I don’t see it going anywhere.
NotSteve_@piefed.ca 2 weeks ago
If you check it out, its not going to become that because it IS that. Its all AI rewritten articles from Wikipedia with Elon’s alt right biases applied. Some of the less political pages aren’t even really rewrites but just copy/pastes
DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social 2 weeks ago
Nazi biases. Not alt right, that sanitized euphemism for fascist fuckhead.
BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
It will be a another propaganda mouthpiece, and have all the credibility of Fox News.
Zorque@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Or conservapedia, the fox news of wikipedias.
eugenevdebs@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
It’ll effect things as much Conservapedia does. A laughing stock to gawk at and nothing more.
I bet by the end of next year it’s dead.
ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
One key difference: Conservapedia was young earth creationist, Grok is not. That amount of difference unfortunately enough to convince a lot of average Joes of credibility.
DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social 2 weeks ago
Conservatives will use the nazipedia and everyone else will mock them for it
phoenixz@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Not to sure about the latter part.
Elmo will be bankrupt in not too much time but for the moment he has pockets so deep he single handedly could fund wikipedia for the next millenia. For as long as he isn’t bankrupt and alive, that turd will be around
Credibly_Human@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
They might not need it to last longer than that.
This is a takeover.
stoly@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Affect
odelik@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
Effect vs affect: Use ‘impact’ and not have to worry about two words that essentially mean the same thing but are context based.
tino@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Anybody going there to test “how bad it is” is giving them traffic, which they can use to brag about its success. Personally, I’d rather completely ignore it and disregard whoever mention it one day as a source, which will never happen hopefuly.
axexrx@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
So set the VPN to Iran so it looks like it’s only popular with ‘ayrab terrorists’ to take always his talking point?
hardcoreufo@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Thats a good idea.
LillyPip@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
It’s not about making something useful. He and a few others are cloning everything any of their cult might use to further fence them in from external information and entertainment.
They’re having a harder time in entertainment, because artists tend to be more liberal, but they’re gaining ground there, too. After a certain point, they’ll just radically censor everything else.
Bristlecone@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
This is what scares me. The fact that they are doing it at all. It’s providing more spaces for people to shut themselves in completely with the information they want. These fucking desperate bigots will never be satisfied until the entire world reflects their bigoted ass beliefs, but since that will never happen they will fight a civil war for Elon out of sheer ignorant self obsession, instead
ReHomed@lemmy.cafe 2 weeks ago
Elon Musk NEVER creates anything very useful as of now
ShankShill@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Elon Musk NEVER creates.
dantheclamman@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
They needed a safe space for their ideas. Less scary stuff like pronouns that make their brains hurt
Eh_I@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
their POSSESSIVE PRONOUN!
ChaoticEntropy@feddit.uk 2 weeks ago
All he has to do is force it front of people’s eyes instead of Wikipedia. It doesn’t actually have to be useful, just in the way.
badgermurphy@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
If it doesn’t do anything useful, I don’t think any amount of shoving in front of people is going to amount to much uptake beyond some cursory fiddling to determine its uselessness.
People hand out flyers to every passerby too, and nearly all of those end up in the nearest trash bin.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Facebook, Twitter, and the general burning of the ‘old’ internet suggest otherwise.
abbiistabbii@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
I mean basically it’s “Conservapedia but it takes itself seriously”.
cley_faye@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Ultimately, this could highlight the incredibly high value of wikipedia as a common ressource, and might lead to better things there.
Maybe.
ChaoticEntropy@feddit.uk 2 weeks ago
Awww… I wish I had that level of optimism.
Sibshops@lemmy.myserv.one 2 weeks ago
The first thing I noticed about grokipedia is that it doesn’t do a good job at qualifying the strength of sources.
fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
That was an intentional design choice no?
samus12345@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
References
Sibshops@lemmy.myserv.one 2 weeks ago
I looked a few things up… and you aren’t wrong. It relies on primary sources way too much.
kadaverin0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
It’s been fun watching Elon go from space Jesus to shorthand for any billionaire vanity project that will amount to nothing.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Anyone who knew much about space knew that was nonsense from the start, as colonizing a subantarctic volcano is literally more practical than colonizing Mars. And that’s assuming paradigm shifts in spaceflight (which, turns out, did not materialize at all).
Don’t get me wrong. SpaceX is great, Starship is cool, research in space is awesome. But ever since I’ve first read Musk’s public thoughts, he struck me as ‘not scientifically grounded,’ and I wondered how that incongruity would shake out.
Fusselwurm@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
a powerful man with a vision can be a great thing. until it isn’t.
PlanterTree@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
What does Grokipedia say on the genocide in South Africa?
MeowerMisfit817@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
well, the website only has one button, that redirects to the actions of Grokipedia with the options to buy or sell some.
I guess you have to interact with their actions to use the thing?
magguzu@midwest.social 2 weeks ago
How long until AI models start training off Grokipedia, and we have the biggest game of hallucination telephone?
ArchmageAzor@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
A collection of hallucinations sounds more like a bad piece of comedy
VerticaGG@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
BradleyUffner@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
They are going to come Wikipedia, then use some flimsy excuse to get it shut down. He’ll position Nazipedia to replace it.
Sir_Kevin@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
Then it will spring up again since the entire database is freely available.
BradleyUffner@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
It’s going to be very hard to maintain with a cohesive group of editors if it’s fractured in to different servers with everyone hosting a different copy. The current data may live on, but it’ll be a zombie.
SethTaylor@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
It will burst into flames, like his cars
isVeryLoud@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
All cars catch fire, some more often, others more intensely. Doesn’t matter if it’s a swastikar or not.
Instead of pitting EVs against ICE, let’s all push to reduce car dependence and instead encourage the development of public transit!
_stranger_@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
little hilter needs his LIEbensraum
A_norny_mousse@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
Or ever create anything (he’s just stealing other people’s creations)
overload@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
Truly the Thomas Edison of the 21st century.
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
They’ll say aw Topsy at my autopsy!
regedit@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
He thinks he’s Nikolai Tesla, but yeah, he’s the other guy!
Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
It’s like if Edison and Henry Ford had a baby and it only inherited the worst parts of both.
TheLowestStone@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
He is not just strealing other people’s creations. He is also giving them incredibly lame names.
A_norny_mousse@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
Just listened to someone attempt a Freudian analysis on the X that he seems so obsessed with. It was trite.
Akasazh@feddit.nl 2 weeks ago
Stealing and enshittifying
BackgrndNoize@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
More like ruining other people’s creations, he has the opposite of Midas touch, anything he touches turns to shit