Jimmy Wales Slams Elon Musk’s X: ‘It’s Not A Great Source!’
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has called out Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) stating that it is not a reliable source of information. He even explored xAI’s new chatbot called Grok.
According to a Fortune report, speaking at the Web Summit in Lisbon, Wales said he was happy to have Large Language Models (LLMs) crawl Wikipedia’s content instead of going through Elon Musk’s X to deliver answers to users through it. chatbots like ChatGPT.
“I’m quite glad they (LLMs) read Wikipedia and not just Elon Musk’s Twitter; It’s really not a great source of truth,” Fortune quoted Wales as saying. Also, when asked about Musk’s new Grok 1-powered chatbot, “Grok,” Wales replied, “I haven’t even heard of it,” and probed the billionaire once more.
Notably, this isn’t the first time they’ve had animosity, albeit an occasional one. Last month in October, Musk, known for his quirky behavior and antics with X, proposed a billion-dollar offer to Wikipedia in exchange for a name change. “I’ll give them a billion dollars if they change their name to Dickipedia,” Elon Musk wrote to X. Musk added that this is “in the name of accuracy.”
Musk also called out Wikipedia for charging money from its readers. “Ever wonder why the Wikimedia Foundation wants so much money?” Musk said in X. He added: “It’s not really necessary to use Wikipedia. You can literally fit a copy of the entire text on your phone! So, what’s the money for? Inquiring minds want to know…”
Prior to this incident, Jimmy Wales had also taken a dig at Musk for censoring people critical of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and not allowing free speech on X.
