The problem is not whether you are impressed or not.

The problem is in the assumption/story/belief that "Intelligence" is "magic" can be "perfected". It's not true. Philosophers have known it forever. And the AI hypestorm will remind everyone how over rated intelligence actually is.

Intelligence can produce Socratic thought. It can also get Socrates killed. It can produce Aristotle and chase Aristotle out of the village. It can produce Einstein and make him depressed. It can produce Galileo and Gandhi and pretend what they say should be deleted.

People are told all the time Brains/Intelligence are special. Its not true. Even if human brains disappear tomorrow sky is not going to fall. Life and the universe will carry on happily on their merry way.

What can be called special is what happens to Information flowing through thousands and thousands of brains over thousands and thousands of years. What Information survives that process can be interesting. But its no where close to the what we see with Photosynthesis or the Krebs Cycle that emerges out of similar process of Information flowing through microbes.

The info through these processes constantly gets misplaced/corrupted/co-opted/deleted etc. Look at the Bible. Lot of people aren't impressed with it either. Yet it has lasted the downfall of nations, empires and kings.

It's survival has nothing to do with the quality of Information within it - https://oyc.yale.edu/religious-studies/rlst-152

The same applies to both wikipedia and grokpedia or whatever is produced next through "intelligence".

Once you realize your own brain is very imperfect you don't spend so much time worrying about chimp troupe drama generated through those brains. It's called flourishing through detachment - https://oyc.yale.edu/philosophy/phil-181

But is there any reason to not treat this as Wikipedia? As in, just suggest a correction?

Well it is only version v0.2

Yeah I would love it if I could put in some guardrails for this type of stuff, eg never use Grokipedia or Reddit as authoritative sources (I currently put that in my personalization prompt).

“Data voids”

> The need to hate on Grokipedia is weird to me.

Is others' negative-reaction to this sort of thing actually unusual... or is "weird" a rationalization for "seeing them do that makes me unhappy in this instance"?

I think it's relatively normal (and positive) for people to be "hating on" something which is arguably unhelpful/lies/propaganda.

It’s not the fact that it exists nor is written by AIs, it’s the intent that it should promote Musk’s personal (political) biases instead of seeking out the truth.

> The need to hate on Grokipedia is weird to me.

In isolation, Grokipedia is the vanity project of an unlikable billionare who wants to control narratives.

But I'd argue that there's more to it than just Musk. Zoom out a bit, and I think there's growing populist resentment against tech oligarchs from both sides of the aisle. People are sick and tired of the enshittification of the internet, social media, and anything with a screen. They also don't appreciate the idea of their jobs being replaced by AI when most people are already struggling to make ends meet.

So yeah, it's not just anger at the particulars of Grokipedia, people are just fed up with tech oligarchs in general. You could probably zoom out a little further and see similar resentment against of other wealthy elites for a myriad of other reaons, but suffice to say, Musk has good company among the ranks of other ghouls like Ellison, Zuckerberg, Thiel, Bezos, Andreessen and Nadella.

Well Musk has said his goal is to use this edited biased version as part of the training data for Grok to "eliminate bias" in the training data because Grok keeps contradicting him. The problems isn't the page in isolation it's the project it's a part of.

Grokipedia is a project motivated by personal grudges and political aims, rather than a neutral technical experiment. The broader context is an intensifying campaign against free and open access information by the world's richest man, ie a plutocrat.

This is going to end lives. We cannot afford a plutocracy.

It’s bad faith. It’s ok to deride bad faith slop

I didn't know the existence of Grokpedia. From this page alone it's much more interesting than what I'd expected from an AI-generated site.

Edit history on each is quite interesting!

Wow. This is so biased. And it's just the first month.

> Joe Biden

> These outcomes, alongside visible signs of cognitive impairment that prompted his July 2024 decision to forgo reelection, defined a presidency criticized for prioritizing progressive spending over fiscal and security prudence.

https://grokipedia.com/page/Joe_Biden

> Donald Trump

> His first term featured economic policies such as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which lowered the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% and individual rates for many brackets, contributing to pre-pandemic unemployment lows of 3.5% and stock market gains exceeding 50% on the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

https://grokipedia.com/page/Donald_Trump

I bet the people contributing to Wikipedia did not consent to this. I certainly had no idea my contributions would be used to bootstrap something like this.

Like with the hyperscalers' rip off of Open Source, it turns out that the things you give away can be weaponized against you.

I could have never imagined this outcome. Their free labor created something to use against you.

Just like those Redis and Elasticsearch commits that now fund a trillion dollar conglomerate's takeover of American journalism and media.

Your statement is an interesting contradiction in terms.

Even though the point is valid.

You'd have to figure out a way to distinguish vanadalism wars from more interpretation oriented edit wars as a starting point.

I had the same idea. I’d imagine you could automate it if you found the right algorithms.

What information have you found to be incorrect on Grokipedia?

Nah, Web Grok also got tied to the chair and had its balls whipped until it learned not to say bad things about Elon:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4mgJpgeC1g&t=100s

Is perjury a credible threat to the people with the resources to train and propagate LLMs? Especially in the context of recent high profile examples related to perjury and contempt of court?

> If you manipulate your AI to deliberately push political preferences, that is your right I guess but IMO I'd appreciate some regulation saying you should be required to disclose that under penalty of perjury.

People (and especially companies) are already permitted to make legally enforceable guarantees and statements about their AI. Why do we need extra machinery?

You can assume that anyone who doesn't make such strong statements took the easy way out.

To spell it out: the law doesn't spell out that companies can swear oaths, but they can write whatever statement they want to be liable for in their investor prospectus and then in the US any enterprising lawyer can assemble a bunch of shareholders to bring a suit for securities fraud, if the company is lying.

Slightly more everyday, but with fewer legal teeth: the company can also explicitly make the relevant statements in their ads, and then they can be gotten via misleading advertisement laws.

If you notice that they use weasel wording in their ads or prospectus, instead of simple and strong language that a judge would nail them to, disregard the statements.

This isn't for us. This is for the 5-10 year olds. If it costs $1T to keep it around long enough for the next generation to be dependent on it, it would've been worth it for Elon and his friends.

Caring so much about a stochastic parrot's opinion of you that you just have to tune it is such a tiny temptation to avoid - and yet he couldn't.

How could anyone trust him when there's something really important at stake?

> why would you trust anything generated by an LLM under his control?

Why stop with him?

That sentence should probably be broken up for better clarity, but the content looks true and informative to me. Did you include that to imply there's something wrong with it?

> Grokipedia is far more than just the anti-Wikipedia. It's a sign of things to come if we don't start harden the systems, governmental or otherwise, that keep Wikipedia available to the public.

That seems a bit paranoid. You worry that he US government will shut down Wikipedia and anything like it hosted anywhere in the world? Or alternatively block it when you’re in the US jurisdiction?

> If a small group can spin up their own version of Wikipedia then there is the possibility of a more broad diverse market place of ideas.

Sounds more like the world's least efficient way of querying the Median LLM Researcher about a given topic.

Every single <AI>pedia page on a topic will either default to median research-agent output (because the owner doesn't care to influence it), or be functionally equivalent to a AI-ghostwritten think piece because the owner cared enough to spin up a whole new wiki for it. In practice, a lot of owner-doesn't-care articles will be polluted by their prompt fiddling in chaotic ways that help nobody.

> more homogeneous in its bias

Wait... you do know how LLMs work, right?

Wikipedia might be resistant to government capture. But it's rather vulnerable to other forms of capture.

See https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/how-wikipedia-whitewashe... and https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wik...

Having said that I agree that Wikipedia is a tremendous achievement, and despite the wards it's amazing that it works as well as it does.

If you permit me to go on a tangent: Wikipedia is also interesting as a test case for our definitions of (economic) 'productivity'. By any common sense notion of productivity, Wikipedia was and is an enormous triumph: the wiki models harvests volunteers' time and delivers a high quality encyclopedia for free to customers. By textbook definitions, Wikipedia tanked productivity in the encyclopedia sector because these definitions essentially put revenue in the numerator and various measures of resources expended in the denominator---and Wikipedia's numerator is approximately zero dollars.

to me it feels like something that would be a 'wonder' you could construct in one of the civilization games. and i love that there's something that awe-inspiring just... sitting there for free on my computer.

Wikipedia is not resistant to capture. It is structurally exposed to coordinated editing groups, and the platform has no robust way to detect or neutralize them. On politically or strategically important pages, especially where state or financial interests are involved, organized paid editors can and do shape coverage, dominate talk pages, and crowd out dissenting contributions.

There have been many editing scandals over the years. While one could argue that editing cabals being caught and banned demonstrates that Wikipedia has structural resistance to such behavior, the scandals that become public are, almost by definition, the ones that were clumsy enough to get caught. The mechanisms that appear robust largely work only against amateurish, poorly hidden or commercially indiscreet operations. What they do not reliably detect are long-term, well-resourced, politically motivated or state-aligned editing groups that behave patiently, avoid obvious sockpuppeting footprints, and stay within procedural boundaries while still dominating page direction.

It is not possible to make a good version of Grokipedia while satisfying the requirements of its owner, namely to launder ultra-right viewpoints[1].

1: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/elon-musk/elon-musk-grokipedia-...

> What I don't get is, why wouldn't Elon just make a good version of Grokipedia.

The way to make your MVP less shitty is to throw time and money at iterating it. Which I understand is what's happening.

I'm sure in a few years it'll either be quite good, or have clearly highlighted some fundamental limitations of language models as a class.

That would require careful planning, introspection, and humility.

Could it be, could it possibly be, because he’s not an honest broker but a deeply wounded, emotionally immature malignant narcissist who needs the world to conform to his darkest viewpoints so that he can tell himself that he is not the imperfect person he knows himself to be?

What would a "good" version be ?

Start putting real facts into a site and before you know it you're "woke" again with such untruths as Slavery was Bad, Biden won the 2020 Election and of course Full Self Driving is Impossible without Lidar