Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales says he is not concerned about Elon Musk’s Grokipedia, the new AI-powered encyclopedia that Musk claims will surpass Wikipedia in accuracy and scale. Speaking at the CNBC Technology Executive Council Summit in New York, Wales said the platform is built on flawed assumptions about how knowledge and trust are created online.
“I’m not optimistic he will create anything very useful right now,” Wales said. “The large language models he is using to write it are going to make massive errors. We know ChatGPT and all the other LLMs are not good enough to write wiki entries.”
Grokipedia’s Big Promise Faces a Reality Check
Grokipedia, developed by Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI, launched with bold claims that it would “exceed Wikipedia by several orders of magnitude in breadth, depth and accuracy.” The site uses AI models to automatically generate encyclopedia-style entries, positioning itself as a more “objective” alternative to Wikipedia.
But according to Wales, those promises are detached from reality. He said he has not personally reviewed Grokipedia yet, but added, “Apparently it has a lot of praise about the genius of Elon Musk in it. So I’m sure that’s completely neutral.”
Musk has accused Wikipedia of harboring “woke bias” by favoring certain viewpoints in its sourcing. Wales rejected that idea completely. “He is mistaken about that,” he said. “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.”
Why Wales Believes AI Encyclopedias Will Fail
For Wales, Grokipedia’s challenge is not ideological but structural. He argues that language models, no matter how advanced, still lack the ability to verify information and discern credible sources from fabricated ones.
He described multiple examples of AI failure in knowledge generation. One involves asking chatbots about his wife, who worked in British politics but is not a public figure. “Every time, I get a plausible but wrong answer,” Wales said. “Any time you ask an LLM to dig deep, it’s a mess.”
He also referenced a case within Wikipedia’s German community, where a contributor used ChatGPT to generate citations that turned out to be fake. “The LLM just very happily makes up books for you,” Wales said. “We caught it because the ISBN numbers didn’t exist.”
These examples, he explained, underscore why he believes AI-only knowledge systems like Grokipedia are inherently unreliable. “It is really important for us and the Wiki community to respond to criticism like that by doubling down on being neutral and being really careful about sources,” he said.
Wikipedia’s Edge: Human Verification and Trust
Wales contrasted Wikipedia’s model with Musk’s Grokipedia, noting that Wikipedia’s 25-year history has built a massive base of user trust that no algorithm can replicate. “We are really happy Wiki is now part of the infrastructure of the world,” he said. “That’s a pretty heavy burden on us.”
He acknowledged that Wikipedia still has room to improve. “In the early days, we were never as bad as the jokes made about us. Now we’re not as good as people think we are,” Wales said. “Of course, we are a lot better than we used to be, but there is still so much work to do.”
He also revealed that Wikipedia’s annual technology budget sits around $175 million, a fraction of the hundreds of billions of dollars tech giants are investing into AI. Despite the disparity, Wales believes the open, community-driven structure of Wikipedia remains more sustainable and trustworthy than corporate-controlled AI models.
The Real Risk: Misinformation at Scale
Wales warned that the rise of AI systems like Grokipedia could flood the internet with believable but false information. “It will fool a lot of people and that is a problem,” he said. “But it will have a hard time fooling the Wiki community.”
He drew a pointed comparison to Musk’s own social platform, X (formerly Twitter). “We talk about errors that ChatGPT makes. Just imagine an AI solely trained on Twitter. That would be a mad, angry AI trained on nonsense,” Wales said.
Despite his skepticism, Wales is not anti-AI. He said Wikipedia is testing limited ways to use artificial intelligence to speed up its editorial process. “Maybe it helps us do our work faster,” he said, noting that AI could assist in identifying new sources or summarizing existing materials, but only under strict human oversight. “The costs of building our own LLM are still too high,” he added.
Why This Debate Matters for Investors and the Future of Knowledge
The public tension between Grokipedia and Wikipedia is about more than two personalities. It represents a larger battle over whether AI-generated information can ever be as credible as human-edited sources.
For investors, the story highlights an important trend: trust is emerging as the most valuable currency in the digital economy. Platforms that cannot guarantee accuracy or transparency risk losing both users and advertisers. Musk’s Grokipedia, while ambitious, faces an uphill climb to establish itself as a trusted knowledge source without a verification system as rigorous as Wikipedia’s.
As Wales put it, “We shouldn’t be ‘Wokepedia.’ That’s not who we should be or what people want from us. It would undermine trust.”
Whether Grokipedia becomes a genuine competitor or another short-lived tech experiment will depend on whether it can solve that problem — not through algorithms, but through credibility.
Facts Must be Learned, Not Generated
Jimmy Wales doesn’t see Grokipedia as a threat to Wikipedia. His confidence rests on a simple idea: facts must be learned, not generated. While Elon Musk is betting on artificial intelligence to rewrite how people consume information, Wikipedia’s founder is betting on human judgment and transparent sourcing to preserve it.
In the growing clash between AI and accuracy, investors, technologists, and everyday users will soon learn which model the public trusts more.
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