Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales isn’t worried about Elon Musk’s Grokipedia: ‘Not optimistic he will create anything very useful right now’
Elon Musk‘s Wikipedia rival Grokipedia got off to a “rocky start” in its public debut, but Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales didn’t even have to take a look at the AI’s output to know what he expected.
“I’m not optimistic he will create anything very useful right now,” Wales said at the CNBC Technology Executive Council Summit in New York City on Tuesday.
Wales had plenty of choice words for Musk, notably in response to allegations that there is “woke bias” on Wikipedia. “He is mistaken about that,” Wales said. “His complaints about Wiki are that we focus on mainstream sources and I am completely unapologetic about that. We don’t treat random crackpots the same as The New England Journal of Medicine and that doesn’t make us woke,” he said at the CNBC event. “It’s a paradox. We are so radical we quote The New York Times.”
“I haven’t had the time to really look at Grokipedia, and it will be interesting to see, but apparently it has a lot of praise about the genius of Elon Musk in it. So I’m sure that’s completely neutral,” he added.
Wales’ digs at Grokipedia — which has its own wiki page — were less about any ongoing spat with Musk and more about his significant concerns about the efforts by all large language models to create a trusted online source of information.
“The LLMs he is using to write it are going to make massive errors,” Wales said. “We know ChatGPT and all the other LLMs are not good enough to write wiki entries.”
Musk seems equally certain of the opposite outcome: “Grokipedia will exceed Wikipedia by several orders of magnitude in breadth, depth and accuracy,” he wrote in a post on Tuesday night.
Wales gave several real-world examples of why he doesn’t have faith in LLMs to recreate what Wikipedia’s global community has built over decades at a fraction of the cost — he estimated the organization’s hard technology costs as $175 million annually versus the tens of billions of dollars big tech companies are constantly pouring into AI efforts, and by one Wall Street estimate, a total of $550 billion in AI spending expected by the so-called hyperscalers next year.
One example Wales cited of LLM’s inaccuracy relates to his wife. Wales said he often asks new chatbot models to research obscure topics as a test of their abilities, and asking who his wife is, a “not famous but known” person, he said, who worked in British politics, always results in a “plausible but wrong” answer. Any time you ask an LLM to dig deep, Wales added, “it’s a mess.”
He also gave the example of a German Wiki community member who wrote a program to verify the ISBN numbers of books cited, and was able to trace notable mistakes to one person. That person ultimately confessed they had used ChatGPT to find citations for text references and the LLM “just very happily makes up books for you,” Wales said.
Wales did say the battles into which he has been drawn, by Musk and by AI, do reinforce a serious message for Wikipedia. “It’s really important for us and the Wiki community to respond to criticism like that by doubling down on being neutral and being really careful about sources,” he said. “We shouldn’t be ‘wokepedia.’ That’s not who we should be or what people want from us. It would undermine trust.”
Wales thinks the public and the media often give Wikipedia too much credit. In its early days, he says, the site was never as bad as the jokes made about it. But now, he says, “We are not as good as they think we are. Of course, we are a lot better than we used to be, but there is still so much work to do.”
And he expects the challenges from technology, and from misinformation, to get worse, with the ability to use LLMs to create fake websites with plausible text getting better and likely able to fool the public. But he says they will have a hard time fooling the Wiki community, which has spent 25 years studying and debating trusted information sources. “But it will fool a lot of people and that is a problem,” he said.
In some cases, this same new technology, which “makes stuff up that is completely useless,” may be useful to Wikipedia, he said. Wales has been doing some work on finding limited domains where AI can uncover additional information in existing sources that should be added to a wiki, a use of gen AI he described as currently being “kind of okay.”
“Maybe it helps us do our work faster,” he said. That feedback loop could be very useful for the site if it developed its own LLM that it could train, but the costs associated with that have led the site to hold off any formal effort while it continues to test the technology, he added.
“We are really happy Wiki is now part of the infrastructure of the world, which is a pretty heavy burden on us. So when people say we’ve gotten biased, we need to take that seriously and work on anything related to it,” Wales said.
But he couldn’t resist putting that another way, too: “We talk about errors that ChatGPT makes. Just imagine an AI solely trained on Twitter. That would be a mad, angry AI trained on nonsense,” Wales said.
Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., during the Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California, US, on Wednesday, Sept. 17, 2025.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is sounding a familiar tune when it comes to artificial intelligence: better to invest too much than too little.
On his company’s third-quarter earnings call on Wednesday, Zuckerberg addressed Meta’s hefty spending this year, most notably its $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI as part of a plan to overhaul the AI unit, now known as Superintelligence Labs.
Some skeptics worry that the spending from Meta and its competitors in AI, namely OpenAI, is fueling a bubble.
For Meta’s newly formed group to have enough computing power to pursue cutting-edge AI models, the company has been building out massive data centers and signing cloud-computing deals with companies like Oracle, Google and CoreWeave.
Zuckerberg said the company is seeing a “pattern” and that it looks like Meta will need even more power than what was originally estimated. Over time, he said, those growing AI investments will eventually pay off in a big way.
“Being able to make a significantly larger investment here is very likely to be a profitable thing over, over some period,” Zuckerberg said on the call.
If Meta overspends on AI-related computing resources, Zuckerberg said, the company can repurpose the capacity and improve its core recommendation systems “in our family of apps and ads in a profitable way.”
Along with its rivals, Meta boosted its expectations for capital expenditures.
Capex this year will now be between $70 billion and $72 billion, compared to prior guidance of $66 billion to $72 billion, the company said.
Meanwhile, Alphabet on Wednesday increased its range for capital expenditures to $91 billion to $93 billion, up from a previous target of $75 billion to $85 billion. And on Microsoft’s earnings call after the bell, the software company said it now expects capex growth to accelerate in 2026 after previously projecting slowing expansion.
Alphabet was the only one of the three to see its stock pop, as the shares jumped 6% in extended trading. Meta shares fell about 8%, and Microsoft dipped more than 3%.
Zuckerberg floated the idea that if Meta ends up with excess computing power, it could offer some to third parties. But he said that isn’t yet an issue.
“Obviously, if you got to a point where you overbuilt, you could have that as an option,” Zuckerberg said.
In the “very worst case,” Zuckerberg said, Meta ends up with several years worth of excess data center capacity. That would result in a “loss and depreciation” of certain assets, but the company would “grow into that and use it over time,” he said.
As it stands today, Meta’s advertising business continues to grow at a healthy pace thanks in part to its AI investments.
“We’re seeing the returns in the core business that’s giving us a lot of confidence that we should be investing a lot more, and we want to make sure that we’re not under investing,” Zuckerberg said.
Revenue in the third quarter rose 26% from a year earlier to $51.24 billion, topping analyst estimates of $49.41 billion and representing the company’s fastest growth rate since the first quarter of 2024.
WATCH: Meta reports Q3 earnings beat, company takes one-time tax charge.
Sundar Pichai, chief executive officer of Alphabet Inc., during the Bloomberg Tech conference in San Francisco, California, US, on Wednesday, June 4, 2025.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Google parent Alphabet is planning a “significant increase” in spend next year as it continues to invest in AI infrastructure to meet the demand of its customer backlog, executives said Wednesday.
The company reported its first $100 billion revenue quarter on Wednesday, beating Wall Street’s expectations for Alphabet’s third quarter. Executives then said that the company plans to grow its capital spend for this year.
“With the growth across our business and demand from Cloud customers, we now expect 2025 capital expenditures to be in a range of $91 billion to $93 billion,” the company said in its earnings report.
It marks the second time the company increased its capital expenditure this year. In July, the company increased its expectation from $75 billion to $85 billion, most of which goes toward investments in projects like new data centers.
There’ll be even more spend in 2026, executives said Wednesday.
“Looking out to 2026, we expect a significant increase in CapEx and will provide more detail on our fourth quarter earnings call,” said Anat Ashkenazi, Alphabet’s finance chief.
The latest increases come as companies across the industry race to build more infrastructure to keep up with billions in customer demand for the compute necessary to power AI services. Also on Wednesday, Meta raised the low end of its guidance for 2025 capital expenditures by $4 billion, saying it expects that figure to come in between $70 billion and $72 billion. That figure was previously $66 billion to $72 billion.
Google executives explained that they’re racing to meet demand for cloud services, which saw a 46% quarter-over-quarter growth to the backlog in the third quarter.
“We continue to drive strong growth in new businesses,” CEO Sundar Pichai said. “Google Cloud accelerated, ending the quarter with $155 billion in backlog.”
The company reported 32% cloud revenue growth from the year prior and is keeping pace with its megacap competitors. Pichai and Ashkenazi said the company has received more $1 billion deals in the last nine months than it had in the past two years combined.
In August, Google won a $10 billion cloud contract from Meta spanning six years. Anthropic last week announced a deal that gives the artificial intelligence company access to up to 1 million of Google’s custom-designed Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs. The deal is worth tens of billions of dollars.
The spend on infrastructure is also helping the company improve its own AI products, executives said on the call.
Google’s flagship AI app Gemini now has more than 650 million monthly active users. That’s up from the 450 million active users Pichai reported the previous quarter.
Search also improved thanks to AI advancements, executives said. Google’s search business generated $56.56 billion in revenue — up 15% from the prior year, tempering fears that the competitive AI landscape may be cannibalizing the company’s core search and ads business.
AI Mode, Google’s AI product that lays within its search engine, has 75 million daily active users in the U.S., and those search queries doubled over the third quarter, executives said. They also reiterated that the company is testing ads in that AI Mode product.
WATCH: Google catching up with Meta pulled on shares following earnings, says D.A. Davidson’s Gil Luria
Technology
ServiceNow CEO denies AI companies are threatening enterprise software: ‘They don’t do what we do’
ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott pushed back against the idea that artificial intelligence technology will make enterprise software redundant in a Wednesday interview with CNBC’s Jim Cramer.
“We realize the world needs access to the great hyperscalers, and so we integrated with all three of them. So that’s a cooperative,” McDermott said. “The world’s going to benefit from the large language model providers, but they don’t do what we do.”
As AI continues to develop, some on Wall Street are worried that companies will be able to rely solely on automated models — making many enterprise software companies’ products obsolete.
ServiceNow makes software for companies including the National Hockey League, FedEx, Ulta Beauty and AstraZeneca.
McDermott detailed some of the functions of ServiceNow’s platform, including management of assets, operations and security.
ServiceNow’s software is needed to perform complex functions — such as regulatory environment processes for financial services firms with decades-old legacy technology — McDermott suggested. He brushed off specific concerns that systems of record, which store data and information, might be “eaten by AI.”
He indicated that agentic AI isn’t up to the task of entering the “already complex environment.”
“Those agents are being sold into silos, and that’s the very reason why AI won’t work,” McDermott said. “AI is a cross-functional sport.”
McDermott also explained why ServiceNow proposed a five-for-one stock split on Wednesday during earnings.
“I feel strongly that we’re right now ready for more than just institutional investors,” he said. “We know the consumer investor wants in, and I don’t want you to have to buy fractional shares and go through all that.”
ServiceNow topped expectations when it reported after close, and shares jumped more than 4% in extended trading.
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