Feel like the canary was when Grokpedia became a project.
Giant waste of time while Anthropic/OAI keep surging forward.
I also keep hearing this narrative that Twitter is a good data source, but I cannot imagine it's a valuable dataset. Sure keeping up with realtime topics can be useful, but I am not sure how much of a product that is.
The Twitter social graph was an amazing data asset. I worked at a consumer insights firm and the data on followers/followings was quite powerful.
Using a custom taxonomy of things (celebrities, influencers, magazines, brands, tv shows, films, games, all kinds of things), we could identify groups of people who liked certain things, and when you looked at what those things were, it gave you a way of understanding who those people were.
With that data, you could work out:
- What celebrities/influencers to use in marketing campaigns
- Where to advertise, and on which tv/radio channels
- What potential brands to collaborate with to expand your customer base
- What tone of voice to use in your advertising
- In some cases, we educated clients about who their actual customers were, better than they understood themselves.
One scenario, we built a social media feed based on the things that a group of customers following a well-known Deodorant brand in the UK would see.
When we presented that to the client, they said “Why are there so many women in bikinis in this feed?”
The brand had repositioned themselves to a male-grooming focussed target market, but had failed to realise that their existing customer base were the ones that had been looking at their TV adverts of women on beaches chasing a man who happened to spray their Deodorant on them. Their advertising from the past had been very effective.
That was the power of Twitter’s data, and it is an absolute shame that Twitter went the way that it did. Mark Zuckerberg once said that Twitter was like “watching a clown car driven into a gold mine”.
I’m pretty sure he must be delighted with how things have panned out since.
This reads very dystopian. You are not optimizing to understand people, you are optimizing to weaponize that understanding against them.
When you know what someone will buy based on exploiting their unconscious preferences, and you are paid to increase sales, you will do it. Especially if your competitors are doing it too.
And this happens at scale, invisibly. People never see the manipulation.
In any case, it is not useful for most people. It is useful for the people doing the deceiving.
The tech is interesting and useful, no need for the scary moral framing.
The original application of the entire field of data science or ML is/was actually based on this paradigm of finding "unconscious preferences" (your words) and hidden patterns. How one chooses to deploy the tech should be judged on its own.
On the current trajectory of tool/data abuse where Palantir et al. are leading the way, this is very low on the sinister scale.
I am not disputing that the tech is interesting. My point is about how it is being applied. The examples above are not about understanding people, they are about exploiting their latent preferences (before: "unconscious preference") for persuasion at scale.
Attempting to normalize that by saying "Palantir is worse" does not make it any less manipulative and sinister.
And to be more on topic, Twitter's value as dataset is overstated. Hardly the panacea people make it out to be.
To not frame the amorality and negative effects centrally and primarily is to be dishonest. There is absolutely not a single person whose wage doesn't rely on not seeing it, that doesn't see that that entire branch of tech has strictly negative value to society.
But of course, line must go up, and it's not you personally being negatively affected, so it doesn't matter.
It doesn't need to lead to AGI or a good coding agent. Some of the only people who are actually profitable in the LLM industry are the people making actual chatbots. There are several bootstrapped startups that run open-weight models with a $10 or $20 monthly sub and make millions in profit off of inference from people just talking to the things, usually for character roleplay / "AI boyfriend/girlfriend" stuff etc. Some of them even took those profits and invested it into training their own bespoke models from scratch, usually on the smaller side although finetunes/retrains of Llama 70b, GLM, and Deepseek 670b have also been done. Grok could probably be profitable if it targeted this space, as the most "intelligent" conversational/uncensored model.
This is already presupposing that profit even matters, though. Musk already burned some $50 billion dollars to control messaging on political discourse with his acquisition of Twitter. It was not about money, but power. After you already have infinite money, the only thing left to spend it on is acquiring more power, which is achieved through influencing politics. LLMs represent a potentially even better propaganda tool than social media platforms. They give you unprecedented access to people's thoughts that they would probably not share online otherwise, and they allow you to more subtly influence people with deeply-personalised narratives.
As an aside that quote from MZ does bother me. There's more to making a web-scale human rights respecting (because it has to, it's the internet, social media needs guidelines) than just making money (which Zuck doesn't seem to care much about anyway if he's sinking apparently billions into metaverse while having no account support)
Of course he would only see it through the lens of cash. I have no idea how profitable Twitter was under Dorsey but it felt the spirit of the company at first was relatively neutral, it was a tool, it was what Jack came up with
Zuck replaced people's email addresses[1], the feed has been wildly unchronological for years. Fix some of those problems wrt. lack of user respect and maybe you can make statements like "all else being equal, clown car goal mine". Or was it "dumb fucks"[2]?
It _was_ a great asset, however, just like models need proper data, as soon as musk removed the clamps on valuable social signals, well, he basically took a dump where he intended to eat.
It’s pretty telling that Elon had to have Grok rewrite Wikipedia because the truth was too woke for him. No idea how anybody can ever take Grok seriously.
Many projects in his companies seem to be more and more Musk's vanity projects than ideas/products one can take seriously. This is also how tesla ended up with a huge cybertruck stock that nobody wants to buy and thus had to be bought by his other companies. And it is becoming worse and worse, especially ever since he bought twitter and sped up his twitting rates.
Sales are artificial boosts yes. The difference is in the connotation. A sale is given for something that people generally would buy anyway, but now more people will. An artificial boost is given to stuff nobody wants, but at a lower price can be convinced to buy.
Or in other words, sales raise $high_number to $higher_number while artificial boosts raise $essentially_zero to $acceptable_number.
the claim is that it moved sales forward in time, but it'll have a corresponding dip in sales later, whereas a good sales campaign increases total volume (virtually no dip, brings in new customers, etc)
look around your house and see how much shit you got that you really want(ed). great salesman (and elon is the best in the history of the civilization) will sell you shit you never thought you wanted :)
The motivation to buy something is always because you want it. That a product doesn’t meet your needs or expectations later is a different story. What’s your evidence to claim that people spending 60k in a cybertruck don’t want it? What’s your evidence to make a similar claim or the opposite for any other purchase? Without evidence it feels you are making baseless claims about peoples motivations.
Is it still your claim that people spending 60k on Cybertruck don’t want it? How do you know? Given the lack evidence feels like motivated thinking. You don’t like Elon and can’t accept that tons of people actually like him and his products.
I think you might be slightly misinformed on how many 10,000+ dollar purchases the average person makes in their lifetime to make sweeping statements of that nature. Advertizing sales on medical procedures or daycare could have the opposite effect I would imagine
Look up what their production targets were and compare that to their sales. A small temporary demand surge isn't going to be enough to chew through their current inventory, let alone keep the production lines busy.
The cybertruck is an amazing vehicle, it was mostly just bad timing- Inflation more than doubled between the announcement and release date so it seemed to come out more expensive than promised, the USA Democratic party abandoned it's environmental side for unions, and the whole "woke" movement ballooned and got violent to the point where people were lighting certain car dealerships on fire and vandalizing people's vehicles on sight.
Probably next generations of kids being fed PragerU studying material will. Something tells me we didn't see a fraction of what's going to happen in the decades to come.
I take Grokipedia very seriously as a threat to society. Sure, they're happy if people read it and fall for - but the primary goal is not to convince humans, but to influence search results of current models & to poison the training data of future models. ChatGPT (and most likely other models/providers too) is already using Grokipedia as a source, so unless you're aware of the possibility and always careful, you might be served Musks newest culture war ideas without ever being the wiser.
It's not enough that everyone on Twitter is forced to read his thoughts, he's trying to make sure his influence reaches everyone else too.
That's an interesting take. Left or right leaning is kind of just relative to society as a whole. If the world really was so left, I think we'd be calling Wikipedia neutral.
Have you ever wondered why the most educated and scholarly people in the country are left leaning?
I suppose you think they were indoctrinated. But finding and teaching the truth is essentially their job. Learning how to evaluate sources and approach research logically is like academia 101.
So doesn’t it seem strange that so few of them ever manage to see that they’re being indoctrinated?
Or do you think a person’s political beliefs are assigned at birth and lefties just like academia for some reason?
I have never wondered that because it is caused by many obvious factors.
>So doesn’t it seem strange that so few of them ever manage to see that they’re being indoctrinated?
I don't think most people care. They are primarily interested in career progression, social status, protecting the feelings of their peers.
They are willing to accept whatever ideology that occupies the water that they swim in. If the status quo was right wing, they would adopt the views of the right wing.
Beyond academia 101, you use that fundamental understanding of the scientific process to break the system, work backwards to justify your conclusion, p-hack, ensure grants and scholarships go to the correct people and whatever else it takes to succeed in that environment. I went to college, I've seen it happen in front of me.
It's the academic's job to find and teach the truth in the same way that it's the mechanic's job to fix your car. But the mechanic's incentives drive him to upsell you, charge you for work you don't need, and hell if he breaks something in the process you'll be coming back a lot sooner. So too it is the job of the knowlege worker to create more knowlege work.
>Or do you think a person’s political beliefs are assigned at birth and lefties just like academia for some reason?
I think that when a "normie" is told to imagine their future, they literally imagine themselves. That is to say, they don't imagine the mechanics of what their daily routine would be or imagine what values and strengths they would have; they imagine their future in the same way that they look at themselves in a mirror. There is a literal self-image involved.
They subscribe to a certain aesthetic (say, an upper-class aesthetic, or an artistic aesthetic, or a blue collar aesthetic or a military aesthetic) based on if they think it looks cool and then they work backwards to figure out what beliefs, values, strengths, etc. they need to fit in with society and play a certain designated character which is probably inspired by something they saw on TV. I am not joking.
So if you adopt, say, a punk rock style you would need to act rebellious to fit in, even if you do not feel the innate urge to do so based on your life experiences. When you enter the mosh pit it is like a safe, culturally designated, controlled aggression. Like sports. Because this style is associated with a certain type of rebellion you would get roped into leftist stuff. And because you become leftist, you naturally want to go to college to fraternize with more leftist types. The whole admission process is designed to filter out students based on their personality, not their tenacity for learning.
You can imagine what the reverse of this would look like for someone adopting right-wing associated aesthetics and culture. There are even right wing academic groups, controlled by a narrower overton window due to their weakness in the academic and bureaucratic domain.
None of this has to do with evaluating sources and approach research logically. Do you believe that people come out of the womb with a lifelong desire to pursue the truth?
This whole system of acculturation just seems too fake, orderly, and planned for me. Furthermore, I think it will ruin the country because it is too individualistic. In an ideal world, your political beliefs would stem from a combination of your life experiences and a practical analysis of the demands of your time.
It's treating politics like some sort of sports team rather than something strategic and decisive.
That’s quite a cynical way of looking at the world. That political belief is driven by conformance into social groups rather than an individual’s desire to seek the truth.
If that’s truly what you believe, then I guess I’ve got no argument that could sway you. In fact, using your view of the world, all political debate is worthless because nobody really seeks an objective truth anyway.
Are you suggesting that academia and all of the other actual places people who learn and know stuff for a living being full of leftists is some conspiracy against you and the right wing?
Touch grass, my dude. These are the thoughts of someone who spends too much time on X.
The fact that the elite and knowledge workers in this country are generally more left-leaning is pretty evident. The right wingers in these ranks make up a distinctive subgroup. These are the thoughts of pretty much everyone everywhere in the country and this becomes apparent if you ask randoms on the street, or you have attended college lectures, or have used a dictionary, or have read wikipedia talk pages, or have compared news sources.
Being a welder or a farmer or a carpenter requires "learning and knowing stuff". These right-wing associated jobs just don't produce knowledge for other people as an end product. That is what makes knowledge work an elite position; not everyone has the luxury of doing knowledge work.
I take issue with your implication that we should all bow down to knowledge workers because they know better. The knowledge workers are the issue here. They are the subject of discussion. This is like when the police investigate themselves and find no wrongdoing.
If we found that the population of professional athletes became dominated by a certain cultural ingroup, and eventually we failed to bring home gold medals at the olympics, we might be correct to question the state of our meritocracy wrt athleticism. Regardless of what people who "improve and use their bodies for a living" think.
The US is losing intellectually and technologically to countries like China. I call into question the general legitimacy of our academic and journalistic institutions.
> The US is losing intellectually and technologically to countries like China. I call into question the general legitimacy of our academic and journalistic institutions.
China has tons of green energy, high speed rail and frequently extols the virtues of socialism.
Bro, I sympathize a little bit but looking to illiterates who hate green energy is not the solution. We could probably agree that in China, engineers and scientists are more listened to but the solution for America is not "less reading".
How about Gabrowski et al.: "Wikipedia’s Intentional Distortion of the History of the Holocaust", about the outsize influence of certain coordinated Polish editors on the Wikipedia articles about Poland and the Holocaust?
> This essay has shown that in the last decade, a handful of editors have been steering Wikipedia’s narrative on Holocaust history away from sound, evidence-driven research, toward a skewed version of events touted by right-wing Polish groups. Wikipedia’s articles on Jewish topics, especially on Polish–Jewish history before, during, and after World War II, contain and bolster harmful stereotypes and fallacies. Our study provides numerous examples, but many more exist. We have shown how the distortionist editors add false content and use unreliable sources or misrepresent legitimate ones.
For a more recent paper, "Disinformation as a tool for digital political activism: Croatian Wikipedia and the case for critical information literacy" by Car et al. says that:
> The Hr.WP [Croatian Wikipedia] case exemplifies disinformation not only as content manipulation, but also as process manipulation weaponising neutrality and verifiability policies to suppress dissent and enforce a single ideological position.
If the debate here is that sustained ethno-political campaigns are slightly shifting Wikipedia over time in a way that requires an academic paper to detect...
I find it more surprising that the common understanding has shifted away from "wikis are crap for anything new or political".
As soon as there is a plausible agenda for selecting a narrative the way Wikipedia works we should be sceptical.
For recent examples, everything to do with Biden and family, and Gamergate. These pages are still full of discussion; and what's written is more ideological than factual. You can follow these pages to see how an in-group selects a narrative.
And these topics are not nearly as controversial as race, feminism, or transgender topics.
My point is more that the history of those pages is a good example of how Wikipedia works for controversial topics; it's not really a process of becoming more correct as better sources are found and argued about like it is on more neutral pages, instead it's an in group deciding what to represent, collecting their preferred opinion pieces. And this changes over time, getting no closer to neutrality within the same articles history.
You can write an equivalent article starting with "Gamergate was a movement reacting to the improper collusion between game developers and journalists" and find just as many sources, but the current article wants to promote the idea that it was a harrassment campaign first.
It was also pretty credibly a psyop orchestrated by Steve Bannon and Jeffrey Epstein, but that’s probably better served in history books and biographies rather than an encyclopedia.
> Gamergate or GamerGate (GG) was a loosely organized misogynistic online harassment campaign motivated by a right-wing backlash against feminism, diversity, and progressivism in video game culture. It was conducted using the hashtag "#Gamergate" primarily in 2014 and 2015. Gamergate targeted women in the video game industry, most notably feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian and video game developers Zoë Quinn and Brianna Wu.
Grokipedia's:
> Gamergate was a grassroots online movement that emerged in August 2014, primarily focused on exposing conflicts of interest and lack of transparency in video game journalism, initiated by a blog post detailing the romantic involvement of indie developer Zoë Quinn with journalists who covered her work without disclosure. The controversy began when Eron Gjoni, Quinn's ex-boyfriend, published "The Zoe Post," accusing her of infidelity with multiple individuals, including Kotaku journalist Nathan Grayson, whose article on Quinn's game Depression Quest omitted any mention of their prior personal contact. This revelation highlighted broader patterns of undisclosed relationships and coordinated industry practices, such as private mailing lists among journalists, fueling demands for ethical reforms like mandatory disclosure policies.
I don't care about "Gamergate" and never use Grokipedia, but Wiki definitely has a stronger slant: it's as if an article about Black Lives Matter started with a statement that it was a campaign meant to scam people to pay for mansions for leadership.
Wikipedia's assessment is more accurate. Wikipedia does go on in its second paragraph to explain the context of the start of the campaign, including "The Zoe Post" and the accusations of conflict of interest. But the broader impact of Gamergate was as a misogynistic online harassment campaign, and Wikipedia is correct to make that the central part of its summary. Just because Grokipedia is more reluctant to state a conclusion does not make it less biased.
As somebody who supported GG for the first month or so, Wikipedia has the better intro from where things stand in 2026. GG started by piggybacking on general distrust of gaming journalists, but was quickly consumed by misogyny.
An article doesn't avoid bias by avoiding unpleasant facts.
Well, I'm naively assuming Grokipedia is being sympathetic to the cause(?) of Gamergate, but if the best thing they could lead the article was essentially "It all started when someone got mad at his ex-girlfriend and her many other boyfriends and wrote something that went viral" ...
... it does sound like an online harassment campaign.
It was. In hindsight it signaled the beginning of the mass weaponization of the internet via social media. It also was NOT grassroots lol. It was very specifically and intentionally enflamed and groomed and funded by people like Steve Bannon and his good buddy Jeffrey Epstein. It wouldn’t have such a big Wikipedia article without them.
I haven't read wikipedia in a long time so I can't answer your question, I am just pointing out that just saying "the facts are correct" is not enough to say there is no bias on wikipedia
The Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study was methodologically flawed. “Children with two black parents were significantly older at adoption, had been in the adoptive home a shorter time, and had experienced a greater number of preadoption placements.”
Reframed, the study seemed to find (a) black kids are adopted less readily and (b) the longer a kid spends in the foster system, the lower their IQ at 17. (There is also limited controlling for epigenetic factors because we didn’t understand those well in the 1970s and 80s.)
Based on how new human cognition is, and genetically similar human races are, it would be somewhat groundbreaking to find an emergent complex trait like IQ to map to social constructs like race, particularly ones as broad as American white and black. (There is more genetic diversity in single African tribes than in some small European countries. And American whites and blacks are all complex hybridized social categories.)
And: it remains perfectly OK to study racial differences in IQ. It's an actively studied topic. In fact, it's studied by at least three major scientific fields (quantitative psychology, behavioral genetics, and molecular genetics). The idea that you can't is a cringe online racist canard borne out of the fact that the studies aren't coming out the way they want them to.
Does it now? Noah Carl would disagree. He was a researcher at Cambridge University that was dismissed after an open letter signed by over 1,400 academics and students accusing him of "racist pseudoscience" for merely arguing that race-IQ research should not be off-limits.
James Flynn (of the Flynn effect) has also publicly stated that grants for research clarifying genetic vs. environmental causes of IQ gaps weren't approved because of university fears of public furor.
You're trying to axiomatically win an argument that is already settled empirically. It won't work. You can just read the papers. My point being: the papers exist, and more are published every year. Once you acknowledge that, your argument is dead. Literally no matter what the papers say. Don't make dumb arguments.
Noah Carl has a sociology doctorate. He doesn't work in the fields that study this; he just tries to launder his way into them.
It seems like the root of your statement is with the existence of "race" as a purely biological classification. Wikipedia correctly notes the consensus position that race is a social construct [0] that's difficult to use accurately when discussing IQ. Grok makes the implicit and incorrect assumption that genetic factors = race, among other issues.
That's not what your previous post was talking about. But if you insist, at least make your point clear. "African Americans" and "Africans" are wildly different genetic populations that get subsumed under the same "Black" racial category in the US. Which one were you talking about?
The latter is more genetically diverse than any other human population by an incredible margin. Making generalized statements about them is impossible (including this one). As for African American populations, ancestry estimates of how closely related they are to African populations vary massively for each individual. Many people are much closer to "white" populations than any African population, due to the history of African Americans in North America. If you really mean race as a geographic proxy, the "black" label is simply confusing what you actually mean.
I understand your point (although I find the babybathwater-ing to be tiring), and I didn't mean to be drawn into a debate about this. But that was entirely the point - that there's a debate. Wikipedia would have you believe that there isn't.
For what it's worth, I'm mixed as hell. European, Asian, Jewish, north african, and native american. I look white, though - and I am, in fact, majority European ancestry. Therefore in most studies (of anything race related), I would presumably be lumped in with white people. It's not a perfect "measure," but it's still the easiest proxy for geographic location of our ancestors that we have and on a population level it works just fine for studies.
I'm not arguing anything other than the fact that Wikipedia is biased.
Though I will say it's beyond argument that geographic ancestry has an effect on IQ on a statistical group level (the reasons for this are what's debated), and that IQ is the best measurement of G that we have.
Okay but you need to… actually present these arguments. Right now you’re stating your position and then affirming it as fact and expecting everyone to trust you.
I already gave you two large meta-analyses and more on the first point along with a and as far as the second goes in the field of psychology that's as established as 2+2=4 is in the math world. If you really want to research that yourself go ahead; I don't feel like I should need to waste my time.
I asked ChatGPT on whether or not it was the "scientific consensus."
"Anonymous surveys of intelligence experts reveal division: a 2016 survey found that about 49% attributed 50% or more of the Black-White gap to genetics, while over 80% attributed at least 20%; an earlier 1980s survey showed similar splits. These views are more common in private or anonymous contexts, contrasting with public statements from bodies like the APA that find no support for genetic explanations."
Hm, sure seems like Wikipedia should probably have a more balanced, nuanced discussion considering the experts are split at least 50/50.
The "scientific consensus" the parent comment mentioned is referring to published studies, with data to back up their conclusions. The numbers you are citing seem to be from an opinion poll. Where did any of the 49% surveyed get the idea that "50% or more of the Black-White gap" can be "attributed" to genetics? What is their methodology for the attribution?
Bringing up an opinion poll as a counterpoint makes it read like you're arguing that Wikipedia should focus less on fact and more on opinion. Of course, you're free to think what you wish, but I suspect that's where most disagree.
We don't really have "intelligence genes" mapped out, if they exist. Therefore, something like this, from Wikipedia: "Genetics do not explain differences in IQ test performance between racial or ethnic groups" is effectively a lie.
Genetics certainly don't explain all the differences in IQ. They very well might not explain the majority of the the difference. However, considering we know that intelligence is quite heritable along with various adoption and twin studies that have happened throughout the decades (along with simple freaking logic), we have a pretty good idea that it explains at least some of the difference. That "opinion poll," while not super-great because only some elected to reply, was a poll of experts in the fields that study this stuff, not random people.
A real unbiased article would mention that (and perhaps whatever counterarguments there are), not straight up do the encyclopedia equivalent of sticking their fingers in their ears and going "nah uh I can't hear you."
>This is an essay.
It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article or a Wikipedia policy, as it has not been reviewed by the community.
>As you can see, Wikipedia is very dismissive to the point of effectively lying.
Did I miss where you presented evidence that wikipedia is wrong? You seem to be taking an assumption you carry (race is related to IQ) and assuming everyone believes it's true as well, thus wikipedia is lying.
There have been many, many studies that show that "race" is related to IQ. A true, unbiased article would show that as well as any well-founded criticisms of it.
Roth, P. L., Bevier, C. A., Bobko, P., Switzer, F. S., & Tyler, P. (2001). Ethnic group differences in cognitive ability in employment and educational settings: A meta-analysis. Personnel Psychology, 54(2), 297–330.
Rushton, J. P., & Jensen, A. R. (2005). Thirty years of research on race differences in cognitive ability. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 11(2), 235–294.
Neisser, U., et al. (1996). Intelligence: Knowns and unknowns. (APA Task Force report). American Psychologist, 51(2), 77–101.
Anyone familiar with Wikipedia etiquette knows how to find the answer to this question. Rather than getting into an argument here about a subject there, I'd prefer you familiarize yourself with the norms of that community, and if you already have or are experienced with them, then you know where to discuss the subject guided by those norms.
My experience is that we end up debating the norms because this forum has different views than Wikipedia itself. That’s interesting to some but not to me so I’m opting out.
In addition, the answer to the question is already available so I want any question asker to put in a little bit of effort and if they’re not going to do that then I’m not really interested in talking to them since I prefer peer interactions to tutorials.
I can understand somebody not liking wikipedia, I cannot understand at all somebody, who is not Elon, liking/preferring "grokipedia" as idea or implementation.
So you can understand someone not liking something, but you cannot understand that person liking the idea of an alternative? What is the idea for you if not just an alternative to the established service with the undesired part changed?
Because not liking something does not imply liking any possible alternative.
Which one is the "undesirable part changed" here? Wikipedia is written by humans, it has a not-for-profit governance model, it encompasses a large, international community of authors/editors that attempt to operate democratically, it has an investment/commitment in being an openly available and public source of information. Grokipedia, on the other hand, is AI-generated, and operated by a for-profit AI company. Even if "grokipedia" managed somehow to get traction and "overthrow" wikipedia, there is no reason on earth why a company would operate it for free and not try to make profit out of it, or use it for their ends in ways much more direct than what may or may not be happening to wikipedia. Having a billionaire basically control something that may be considered "ground truth" of information seems a bad idea, and having AI generate that an even worse one.
I can understand somebody not liking something in how wikipedia is governed or operating, after all whatever has to do with getting humans work together in such a scale is bound to be challenging. I can understand somebody ideologically disagreeing with some of the stances that such a project has to take eventually (even if one tries to be neutral as much as possible, it is inevitable to avoid some clash somewhere about where this neutrality exactly lies). But grokipedia much more than "wikipedia but different ideologically".
edit: just to be clear, I see a critique of the "idea of grokipedia" as eg the critique of it being a billionaire controlled, AI generated project to substitute wikipedia; a critique of the implementation would be finding flaws to actual articles in grokipedia (overall). I think the idea of it is already flawed enough.
Wikipedia is fine for uncontroversial facts. The obscure ones can have individual mistakes but it's generally correct.
For controversial topics, it's an eternal battle between factions of "volunteers" trying to present their view of a conflict. The articles reflect which side has the best organized influencer operations. Factual truth may or may not shine through, but as a side effect, not a result of the governing process.
Grokipedia operates by Grok writing what it considers the true and interesting facts. That doesn't mean it's always right, but it's a model far less influenced by influencer operations.
I wildly disagree with the critique based on the wealth of the top executive. I care about the truth and quality of the articles.
>Grokipedia operates by Grok writing what it considers the true and interesting facts. That doesn't mean it's always right, but it's a model far less influenced by influencer operations.
If Grok is trained on a corpus of information written by humans trying to influence other humans, and it has no ability to perform its own original investigation in the real world, then how can it be anything but the product of influence?
Maybe ask a Ukrainian soldier which they prefer (modern armor is often made of depleted uranium). Environment shapes such preferences far more than personality.
> I cannot understand at all somebody, who is not Elon, liking/preferring "grokipedia" as idea or implementation.
Really? Have you used AI to write documentation for software? Or used AI to generate deep research reports by scouring the internet?
Because, while both can have some issues (but so do humans), AI already does extremely well at both those tasks (multiple models do, look at the various labs' Deep Research products, or look at NotebookLM).
Grokipedia is roughly the same concept of "take these 10,000 topics, and for each topic make a deep research report, verify stuff, etc, and make minimal changes to the existing deep research report on it. preserve citations"
So it's not like it's automatically some anti-woke can't-be-trusted thing. In fact, if you trust the idea of an AI doing deep research reports, this is a generalizable and automated form of that.
We can judge an idea by its merits, politics aside. I think it's a fascinating idea in general (like the idea of writing software documentation or doing deep research reports), whether it needs tweaks to remove political bias aside.
> Have you used AI to write documentation for software?
Hi. I have edited AI-generated first drafts of documentation -- in the last few months, so we are not talking about old and moldy models -- and describing the performance as "extremely well" is exceedingly generous. Large language models write documentation the same way they do all tasks, i.e., through statistical computation of the most likely output. So, in no particular order:
- AI-authored documentation is not aware of your house style guide. (No, giving it your style guide will not help.)
- AI-authored documentation will not match your house voice. (No, saying "please write this in the voice of the other documentation in this repo" will not help.)
- The generated documentation will tend to be extremely generic and repetitive, often effectively duplicating other work in your documentation repo.
- Internal links to other pages will often be incorrect.
- Summaries will often be superfluous.
- It will love "here is a common problem and here is how to fix it" sections, whether or not that's appropriate for the kind of document it's writing. (It won't distinguish reliably between tutorial documentation, reference documentation, and cookbook articles.)
- The common problems it tells you how to fix are sometimes imagined and frequently not actually problems worth documenting.
- It's subject to unnecessary digression, e.g., while writing a high-level overview of how to accomplish a task, it will mention that using version control is a good idea, then detour for a hundred lines giving you a quick introduction to Git.
As for using AI "to generate deep research reports by scouring the internet", that sounds like an incredibly fraught idea. LLMs are not doing searches, they are doing statistical computation of likely results. In practice the results of that computation and a web search frequently line up, but "frequently" is not good enough for "deep research": the fewer points of reference for a complex query there are in an LLM's training corpus, the more likely it is to generate a bullshit answer delivered with a veneer of absolute confidence. Perhaps you can make the case that that's still a good place to start, but it is absolutely not something to rely on.
>LLMs are not doing searches, they are doing statistical computation of likely results.
This was true of ChatGPT in 2022, but any modern platform that advertises a "deep research" feature provides its LLMs with tools to actually do a web search, pull the results it finds into context and cite them in the generated text.
That's not at all been my experience. My experience has been one of constant amazement (and still surprise) when it catches nuances in behavior from just reading the code.
I'm sure there are many variables across our experiences. But I know I'm not imagining what I'm seeing, so I'm bullish on the idea of an AI-curated encyclopedia, whether Elon Musk is involved or not.
No, I don't trust an encyclopedia generated by AI. Projects with much narrower scopes are not comparable.
edit: I am not very excited by AI-generated documentations either. I think that LLMs are very useful tools, but I see a potential problem when the sources of information that their usefulness is largely based on is also LLM-generated. I am afraid that this will inevitably result in drop in quality that will also affect the LLMs themselves downstream. I think we underestimate the importance that intentionality in human-written text plays in being in the training sets/context windows of LLMs for them to give relevant/useful output.
Elon at some point threatened to have an LLM rewrite all of the training data to remove woke. I assume Grokipedia is his experiment at doing this (and perhaps hoping it will infect other training sets too?) ...
That's not how it works. You're making the extraordinary claim that a widely trusted and strictly moderated encyclopedia with tons and tons of citations to back up the truthfulness of its contents is not mostly true. You get to prove that assertion, since your claim is the extraordinary one.
Epstein files. State actors, company security departments, activists, etc influence and seemingly control the more meaningful/controversial Wikipedia sections.
I think it’s just an inherent flaw in ANY centralized and universal repository of knowledge.
I haven’t actually ever been on grokipedia but I’m sure Elon influences it, I mean if I paid for something I’d expect it to be to my liking too.
Not sure if this is an example of something Musk hates, but here’s a paragraph from the “2016 presidential campaign” section of the Donald Trump article on Wikipedia.
> Trump's FEC-required reports listed assets above $1.4 billion and outstanding debts of at least $265 million.[140][141] He did not release his tax returns, contrary to the practice of every major candidate since 1976 and to promises he made in 2014 and 2015 to release them if he ran for office.[142][143]
I could not find any mention of tax returns on the Donald Trump page of Grokipedia.
No, when did I say that? That’s impossible for anything of the size of Wikipedia.
I was suggesting that Elon Musk, a man who has donated hundreds of millions to Trump and other Republican causes, who has numerous financial conflicts of interest, and who has publicly lied numerous times, is never going to produce a more unbiased and factual encyclopedia than Wikipedia.
Especially when his effort to do so is essentially AI slop from a third rate LLM on top of his own biases.
Right, and Wikipedia leadership is free of any conflicts of interest:
During and after her Wikimedia role, Maher drew fire for statements perceived as rejecting objective truth or Wikipedia’s traditional “free and open” model:
• In a 2021 TED Talk, she described reverence for truth as potentially a “distraction” hindering common ground.
• She called Wikipedia’s free-and-open ethos a “white male Westernized construct” that excluded diverse communities.
Twitter's communication style being based around brevity, slang, memes, spam and non-threaded conversations seems particularly unlikely to be helpful for optimising LLMs
>Twitter's communication style being based around brevity
Is this still true? Every once in a while someone sends a link around to some madman explaining how race or economics or whatever "really" works and it's like a full dissertation with headings, footnotes, clip art. They're halfway to reinventing Grok-o-pedia right there in Twitter. I mean X. I was promised that "X gonna give it to you" but it turns out "it" is some form of brain chlymidia.
Elon was running some sort of $1m competition for the “best” Twitter post for a few months. I think those type of dissertations about Phrenology and the like have fallen off a cliff since the competition ended.
There's probably a selection bias involved. I haven't been a regular user for a while now, but the big threads like that were significantly outnumbered by individual posts. Meanwhile I'm not likely to send a link to someone of a single single-sentence tweet, because there's not enough meat to it. The stuff that could be shared would usually be an image from the tweet, which I could share directly.
How recent?
As recently as last weekend I was seeing blue check marks replying with AI generated only-technically-related replies on top of the majority of the posts I looked at.
Limits are so low that I cancelled after about two weeks on my initial $0 trial. I tried making a change to a tiny code base with Claude Sonnet (which they offer in Antigravity). It couldn't even finish the change before my weekly limit was used up, reset in 7 days.
I tried the Anthropic models because gemini-pro had already been rate limited with a 5 day wait. I got some actual usage out of the Google model, but laughably little compared to what I got with ChatGPT Plus. This is definitely not an imagined thing from my side, you just have to look at the Antigravity forums:
I find it pretty good. And Gemini 3.1 pro seems quite capable. Not as good at some things as Claude, but better at others. I was trying to target a verilog design to an uncommon FPGA and board and Gemini went out and searched for the FPGA docs and examined the schematics for the board in able to do the pin assignments (generated .ccf file). Not sure of Claude could've done that.
Probably the best value for a good amount of anthropic credits. You can also share your Google ai subscription with up to four family members and they all get the same amount of credits...
Twitter has the mass adoption, and it takes an effort to avoid bot/particular view bias - but as a valuable content source, it's a far cry from what it once was before Musk took it over.
AFAIK Grok still doesn’t have a CLI coding agent that works with a subscription. That’s a shame. Grok Code Fast 1 was pretty impressive when it came out - for what it did, and they never followed it up with a new version.
It's long been taken over by Telegram, which among its other advantages (more like a message board than 'town square'), doesn't have hordes of people commenting "@grok explain this to me" under every post.
It's going to be a mixed batch, but any time there's world events, since as far back as I can think, Twitter (now X) was always first in breaking news. There's plenty of people and news orgs still on X because they need to be for the audience.
Twotter as a data source is interesting. I think it gets over hyped because thats elons grift. But i cant deny that the real time info aspect of it is pretty valuable. But i definitely think that its not that much more valuable than the open internet from a context source perspective. Everything worthwhile on twitter will end up elsewhere with a bit of lag. And the stuff that wont is noise anyway
I'm not a fan of Elon's software endeavors, ever since he bought Twitter and turned it into an even worse cesspool of angry political nonsense than it used to be. I don't like how he's been biasing Grok, etc.
But, what exactly is so bad about Grokipedia? It's a different approach and I think a valid one: trying to do with AI what people have been doing manually at Wikipedia. I'm curious to hear the substantive comparisons.
I think the issue is simply this: wikipedia trends towards unbiased info through use of the crowd. Grok, with a single owner with an ax to grind, trends towards whatever elon wants. It’s poisoned information under the control of one man - cyberpunk novels have been written about less.
A concrete example: a few weeks ago, Musk was making a big deal about how most of his massive net worth was not held in cash, and by a total coincidence the phrase "primarily derived from equity stakes rather than cash" showed up on his Grokipedia page in the section about net worth. I checked the pages of several other extremely wealthy people and none of them had such a comment.
> wikipedia trends towards unbiased info through use of the crowd
See, this is why people even give a project like Grokipedia the time of day. While in theory anyone can edit Wikipedia, in practice the moderators form a much smaller and weirder cabal, and they reject edits that go against their views. The frustration with the naive assertion that Wikipedia distills the wisdom of the crowds with the reality of Wikipedia on any page of note is what provides the psychic permission to even entertain a project with such obvious flaws as Grokipedia.
> and they reject edits that go against their views
Citation needed. See what i did there ;)
They reject edits that go against their views on tone and sourcing not political views that i am aware of - i am sure it happens from time to time but unless there’s a consistant bias in one direction this isn’t a valid criticism of the political neutrality of wikipedia.
Even if there is rampant bias in wikipedia, that’s a reason to fork it and change the structure and gatekeeping - not to replace it with a techno-authoritarian ai version controlled by a single billionaire. That’s amplifying the problem from an aggregate bias of 600,000 users who have made an edit in the last 30 days[1] to just one editor who uses ai to make it seem impartial.
I would prefer to fork Wikipedia as well, but in practice I don't think that works, given the many failed Wikipedia forks of the past 20 years. On the internet, the only way to get any alternative to a widely-used source like Wikipedia is to use a significantly different approach. Otherwise, you just look like a cheap knockoff, even to people who might otherwise agree with your approach. Worse is better, after all - worse in most ways, but better or different in at least one innovative way.
It's controlled by a guy who spends all day retweeting white supremacists and lying about his companies. Why should anyone who isn't a white supremacist use it?
Giant waste of time while Anthropic/OAI keep surging forward.
I also keep hearing this narrative that Twitter is a good data source, but I cannot imagine it's a valuable dataset. Sure keeping up with realtime topics can be useful, but I am not sure how much of a product that is.