The founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, doubts the ability of artificial intelligence to write encyclopedic articles. He expressed this at the CNBC summit on Tuesday while commenting on Elon Musk's launch of an AI encyclopedia called "Grokipedia."
"I'm not too optimistic about it creating anything truly useful right now," Wales said.
He emphasized that his criticism of Grokipedia is not due to a personal conflict with Elon Musk, but rather deep doubts about whether any of the current artificial intelligence models can create a truly reliable source of knowledge.
"The language models he is using will make colossal mistakes. We know that ChatGPT and other LLMs are not at all ready to write encyclopedic articles," Wales stated.
He added that Musk is mistaken in blaming Wikipedia for being overly politically correct.
"His complaints about Wikipedia are that we rely on mainstream sources, and I see absolutely no problem with that. We do not treat random conspiracy theory fans the same way we treat The New England Journal of Medicine — and that does not make us 'woke'. It's a paradox. We are so radical that we cite The New York Times," Wales said.
"I haven't had the time to thoroughly review Grokipedia, but judging by the feedback, there is a lot of praise for Elon Musk's genius. So, I'm sure it is completely neutral," he added ironically.
Wales stated that he does not deny the benefits of artificial intelligence, and the Wikipedia team is even testing its application for finding additional information in existing sources.
In his opinion, integration with AI could be truly beneficial if Wikipedia created its own language model that could be trained on its data, but the high cost currently hinders the realization of this idea.
