Encyclopædia Britannica

via the the ways the robots give us information is really important we need to figure out where they're getting it and and what kinds of things they reference so that you know it's like it's only a first level search engine ever to the information that you've got to go follow its footnotes Yeah,

I got a little upset when my son was in high school and I got him a Britannica.

I guess it has to be a subscription now.

They don't have physical books anymore.

And you could not be taller than the king.

I mean, see, so, but the thing is that the game on Grok is, and people are worried about this, it's like, to the extent they're going to use the Grok or the other robots to answer questions of general knowledge.

I mean, you say, we need general knowledge to ask questions well, but that we're going to ask them, like your son, you wanted your son to go to the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Mm-hmm.

Also, the, here's the best one, you guys, and I'm not kidding.

This is directly from Britannica.

Bernard Leopold Frederik Eberhard Julius Kohart Carl Gottfried Peter.

Peta.

Yes, yes.

Uh, in 1933, he was a member of that.

Then in 1936, while hanging out in Paris, France, he was working with this thing called IG Farben, which is, uh, at least according to Britannica, "A complex merger of German manufacturers of dyestuffs," that's the word-

Uh-huh

You know, we have this ineffective encyclopedia, access to the world's encyclopedia without getting, you know, reading through all those books that I had as kids.

It's like the Britannica, which is 30 volumes and finding the right page can instantly get an answer, but it doesn't show up as GDP.

So I love this point, and you're 100% right to say, look, if you look at a lot of new technology, what it's done is raised our surplus.

And that's not the same thing as raising GDP.

Yeah.

Hey, how it come full circle? One time, you know, back in the day when your parents used to buy those Britannica encyclopedias? Of course.

Right? You buy A, B, and C.

When you come down to S and C's band, guess who's picture was in the Britannica thing? Rudy Wells.

For real? Rudy Wells.

And he took it to school to show him, and he just started laughing and crying.

No fucking congressman was like, hey, we got to put the fucking brakes on.

Yeah, I mean – The Britannica

fucking people are going to – But the Britannica took advantage of us for

years and years.

They took advantage of us.

Elon Musk has framed the project as a purge of propaganda, a replacement for what he calls legacy media, and a step towards building a more open-source repository of knowledge.

But given Grokopedia's reliance on his chatbot Grok, the result may be less Encyclopedia Britannica and more Reddit-meets-Twitter trolls, as his chatbot does train on sources like that.

According to XAI, Grok will be responsible for all fact-checking on Grokopedia, which is a bit like asking a parrot to verify a Shakespeare quote.

It might sound convincing, but you wouldn't want to bet your reputation on its accuracy.

Over a millennium later, China's Yongle Encyclopedia was compiled by over 2,000 scholars.

It remained the largest encyclopedia in the world for a thousand years.

In 1768, the first Encyclopedia Britannica was published, and if we fast forward to 2001, Wikipedia upended the model entirely.

With Wikipedia, encyclopedias were no longer the domain of scholars and scribes.

And right now, you know, in the old days when we had, we didn't have an encyclopedia in the house.

Remember, it was Britannica or a world book.

We didn't have, you know, a lot of reference books.

Well, now we've got a phone.