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Tim Bray on Grokipedia

(www.tbray.org)
175 points Bogdanp | 3 comments | 31 Oct 25 21:41 UTC | HN request time: 0.822s | source
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alyxya ◴[31 Oct 25 22:37 UTC] No.45777464[source]▶
At a glance, Grokipedia seems quite promising to me, considering how new it is. There are plenty of external citations, so rather than relying on a model to recall information internally, it’s likely effectively just summarizing external references. The fact that it’s automatically generated at scale means it can be iterated on to improve fact checking reliability, exclude certain known sources as unreliable, and ensure it has up-to-date and valid citation links. We’ll have to wait and see how it changes over time, but I expect an AI driven online encyclopedia to eventually replace the need for a fully human wikipedia.
replies(1): >>45777493 #
1. MallocVoidstar ◴[31 Oct 25 22:40 UTC] No.45777493[source]▶
> There are plenty of external citations, so rather than relying on a model to recall information internally, it’s likely effectively just summarizing external references.

And according to Tim Bray, it's doing that badly.

> All the references are just URLs and at least some of them entirely fail to support the text.

replies(1): >>45777523 #
2. alyxya ◴[31 Oct 25 22:44 UTC] No.45777523[source]▶
It’s the first release, so I expect it to get better over time. I didn’t care for ChatGPT when it was first released and thought it wouldn’t be trustworthy, but it’s much better now.
replies(1): >>45777818 #
3. nickthegreek ◴[31 Oct 25 23:24 UTC] No.45777818[source]▶
Why release an untrustworthy encyclopedia at all? It doesn’t appear to be better than the existing options in any way and worse in many.