Wikipedia Founder, Jimmy Wales: What Can You Trust In The Age of AI?

0:00You know, somebody said to me, oh, the VCs must love this, that, you know, all these people just do the work for free. Actually, the funny thing is VCs are the only people who ever said, why don't you pay people? They're like, what if you paid people like a dollar per article or something like that? Wouldn't you get more articles? And I was like, get more crap, that's for sure.

0:17Cameron:Hello, and welcome to Giant Ideas with me, Cameron McLean, and me, Tommy Stadlin. We're co-founders of Giant Ventures, which builds and backs purpose-driven companies. At Giant, we're lucky to meet extraordinary people with giant ideas that are changing the world. This podcast brings you behind-the-scenes access to those ideas and the inspiring stories of the people behind them. We explore how one giant idea can kickstart a billion-dollar company, shape culture, and transform life as we know it.

0:47Cameron:Today on the podcast, we are joined by Jimmy Wales. Jimmy, along with millions of volunteers, created a fundamental part of the internet, Wikipedia, a crowdsource encyclopedia which became the foundation of the internet as we know it today, with 11 billion viewers a month. Describing himself as pathologically optimistic, he did something that most people considered impossible. A gift to the world that required selflessness, organization, and a deep sense of purpose. His latest book, The Seven Rules of Trust, talks about what made that possible and how others can learn from it. Today we'll talk about Jimmy's journey, building Wikipedia, and trust in the age of AI.

1:25As Stephen Fry says, everything in our thrilling and chilling future depends on one increasingly diminishing human resource, trust. Jimmy Wales is in a better position than almost anyone to teach the world the most important lessons. Jimmy, welcome to Giant Ideas. Good to be here. Thanks for coming. So let's start by talking about Wikipedia. So many lessons that I'm sure you've learned and the world has learned from the founding of wikipedia one curious uh element of it or very interesting elements of it is that you decided to start it as a non-profit we interviewed tim berners lee the creator of the worldwide web who created the web for nothing you created a huge part of the worldwide web again without personal gain do you do you personally regret any of that are you happy you did it and then maybe more importantly for the world do you think it's been a really good thing for wikipedia that it has been a non-profit yeah no i don't have any regrets.

2:16I mean, it's an amazing thing to be a part of. And my life is unbelievably interesting and fun. I also have Fandom, my for-profit wiki company, which has done very well, a couple hundred million revenue and all that. So that's fine. I'm not poor. And the meaning of Wikipedia in the long run, I think in 500 years, people will look back on this era and say, Like, yeah, that was a bit of a crazy, horrible time. And yet these nice people were really good and they were sharing knowledge. And that seems like a useful thing to have done. And how has it impacted us? I mean, I think the most important thing is actually not necessarily for-profit versus non-profit, although I do think that is relevant.

3:03But it's actually more broadly the business model. So even if you're a non-profit, you have to have a business model. You've got to pay the bills and you've got to sort of, you know, make it work. And if we had advertising as a business model, I think that would be pretty problematic in lots of ways. You know, a lot of the stuff that we've seen happen to purely ad-supported journalism where there is a really strong temptation to have clickbait headlines and to think about viral things and all of that. Which is fine in certain areas, but really would be a bit odd for Wikipedia. It'd be problematic, I would say.

3:46Cameron:So sort of a purity to the Wikipedia approach allows you to build some of that trust, I presume. Yeah, and the organization, so the Wikimedia Foundation, can remain very, very mission-driven. And so, you know, our goal is a free encyclopedia for every single person on the planet in their own language. That's how we make decisions. And so when we have decisions to make, which even companies that actually do care a lot about that same kind of value system, I would say Google does. But Google has to prioritize, of course, the markets where there's big ad revenue. They're good about trying to support as many languages as they can and things like that.

4:26But obviously, it's like the next million users of Google in California are going to be much more interesting and more profitable than the next million in Kenya. Sure. just because that's the way the market is. Whereas for us, it's like, well, that hardly matters. And indeed, for our business model, which is donation-based, it's probably those next million in Kenya who people are really more excited about. Having built Wikipedia as a non-profit, you've kept it as a non-profit. Famously, OpenAI started as a non-profit and is basically not really a non-profit anymore for all intents and purposes.

5:00What do you make of that situation and how do you think they should proceed? Well, it's very complicated. I've sort of made a sort of amateur study of it, as I think many of us in the industry have. It's like, what the hell is going on over there? Like, how do you do that? So it's really, you know, it's still, I think, technically owned by the nonprofit at the top of it. But it's got this sort of capped return, blah, blah, blah. You know, it's very complicated. And apparently Sam Altman doesn't own any shares, which is also quite interesting. I don't know what to make of that either. So I think one of the keys is, you know, basically if you think about what is Wikipedia, Wikipedia is often reported as a tech story.

5:45But the truth is the actual tech infrastructure is minimal. Like it's really, you know, if you think about, okay, what's the technology of Wikipedia? Fundamentally, it's a web server, web browser, database, you know, the idea of wiki. It's very basic. and all of those things. And it's really a community story. It's about the people. It's about the humans who are building this thing. And so therefore the cost is not nearly what it costs to do sort of frontier AI. And so I will say like, okay, to do OpenAI as a nonprofit, I can't think of a single way if it were set up as a charity that they would say, well, okay, we need to invest$120 billion in GPUs.

6:31yeah good luck raising that kind of money unless there's going to be some kind of return from investors like that that's sort of obvious whereas for wikipedia you know we're trying to raise whatever a couple hundred million uh and we've got a massive massive audience you know it's doable and it's always been doable all along i mean one of the great things about wikipedia is it's really bootstrapped in the in that sense you know it's like we've never had to go for outside capital and so forth, it's always just been donations and largely small donors. So there is a difference. So it's very easy for people to sort of tsk-tsk at OpenAI, but I'm like, well, go ahead and start a charity and raise$2 million and see what you can do with API.

7:13I mean, good luck with GPUs. It's going to be quite hard.

7:19Cameron:We've talked a bit about your incentives starting a non-profit versus a profit, but thinking about the incentives of the users of wikipedia so you've created arguably probably the biggest historical body of knowledge or certainly one of them without financial incentives for those contributing so you've had a front row seat for the last 20 years what have you learned about i guess human motivation and and why people are doing this yeah i think this is this is really huge and um you know so so fandom is wiki communities as well and it's ad supported and so on. And it's mainly about entertainment, gaming, and so forth.

7:55And so one of the first hypotheses that I had but I wasn't sure about is would people be willing to contribute to, I'll give an example, the Muppet Wiki, which you can't really set up as a charity because you can't convince the government that's a charitable project, but it's a community project. So would people contribute? Would they contribute unless maybe like social media influencers, Maybe they need some sort of deals or whatever. It turns out they do. It's because they love – they have a passion about some area of knowledge or something that they're interested in. They have oftentimes a community motive that you wouldn't think of as charitable.

8:36So people who are working in a lot of gaming wikis, they're quite proud of their knowledge and they're quite happy to help other people like them who are trying to get through that very complicated level on the game and so on and so forth. So it's interesting that, you know, when I was raising money for fandom, somebody said to me, oh, the VCs must love this, that all these people just do the work for free and so on. I'm like, actually, the funny thing is VCs are the only people who ever said, why don't you pay people? They're like, what if you paid people like a dollar per article or something like that?

9:14Wouldn't you get more articles? And I was like, you would get more crap, that's for sure. And actually that's another piece of it. It's like the people writing Wikipedia aren't doing it for very low pay. If you want good quality writing, you can either pay good journalists a proper salary, right? Or you can get people who are really passionate about it to do it out of the love of what they're doing. but if you pay people a very low amount you're just going to get a bunch of nonsense there was a company called demand media which had a little flurry of a splash i don't know whatever happened to them but haven't heard about them in a long time but they basically were using algorithms to detect like what people were searching for and they would find quirky search terms that had no coverage and then they would pay people like a dollar or something you know to write you know instead of just an article about how to wash your dog it'd be a specific how to wash a pomeranian And the content was terrible because people were like, oh, I'll take a dollar.

10:11I know nothing about dogs or Pomeranians, but I need a dollar, so I'll do it. And it just wasn't good. Whereas the Muppet Wiki, let me tell you, very, very good.

10:19Cameron:People care about Muppets. Yeah. And, you know, the same is true. I mean, it's a fun example, but, you know, particularly around geek culture, you can imagine the people who are really deeply knowledgeable about Lord of the Rings and things like that. And then the same for Wikipedia. A lot of the people involved in Wikipedia are – they're motivated, yes, by the charitable vision, free encyclopedia for everyone. That sounds like a worthwhile way of spending your time. But they're also very motivated about their passion around a certain topic. So people who are writing about trains or whatever it might be, they're deeply knowledgeable.

10:56And I, you know, just count me as any ordinary person who I sometimes stumble across a Wikipedia page and I'm like, who are these people? It's unbelievable. Like, you know, it's like here's some very obscure airplane, you know, that was in production from 1934 to 1938. And there's this massive article about all the details, including specific airframes and which ones are still flying. And I'm like, wow, this is fantastic. But you wouldn't you couldn't pay anybody to do that. and it wouldn't make sense. But what does make sense is having a community that's welcoming to that person who's like, hey, I know about this.

11:37I'm obsessed. I'm not going to apologize for obsession. I'm just going to go with it.

11:40Cameron:So a combination of sort of contributing to the community, but also I guess some self-fulfillment from being an expert in something. Yeah, and one of the interesting things is

11:52people, human beings do like recognition from other human beings. That visibility is psychologically valuable. And in some cases, that can be a bad thing. Like a lot of times, the way social media is designed, the way to get visibility and attention is to behave badly because you get more followers that way and this, that, and the other. The more positive side of it is people who get a huge following because they're actually interesting and they've got good ideas or they are attractive in sort of visual social media and things like that. But for the Wikipedians, nobody's trying to get famous and be an influencer and get a sponsorship deal or anything like that.

12:35But they still do care about the feedback from other human beings. But actually, the person who's obsessively writing about the Muppets doesn't really care what any of us think. They just want the other Muppet fans to sort of say, oh wow you're you're amazing you know and who are these people are we talking about a very small number of people who create 80 of it or is it actually across because you have to be so niche in these areas to be able to write about it is it a vast number of writers it's it's it's fast but it's it's narrower it's hard to really answer that question so i would say um you know there's the really really active contributors so the people who are the most active are actually probably not the people who are obsessive about a niche they're obsessive about wikipedia right so they're doing work across the whole thing and they're checking references and they're monitoring incoming stuff for bad behavior and they're being admins and things like that um but yeah i mean one of the things a lot of people have the idea of wikipedia that it's 10 million people adding one sentence each but it's really is a much more narrow group of people who are really very focused on Wikipedia and the standards and the rules and how it all works.

13:52Cameron:Well, that's, I think, a great segue. I mean, Wikipedia promises a neutral point of view, which sounds ideal. But in reality, is it just a reflection of who shows up, who argues the most, who cares the most, and reflective of that group that you described? Because that is, I guess, one of the recent criticisms from some people. Sure. So it's a bit of a yes and a no to answer that. So on the one hand, yes, of course, we all have our biases and we know about the things we know about. And, you know, very often one of the things I say about bias is that it's often like if you ask a fish about water, the fish will say, what water?

14:33Because you're just swimming in it. Like you don't really even realize you're biased in many cases. And that's because of the media you consume and the culture you live in and so on and so forth. So that's unavoidable, kind of unavoidable. The other bit is to say like if you have people who have a genuine commitment to neutrality, they can definitely overcome their own personal viewpoint and say, actually, I do understand. You know, like we're not here to settle the argument. We're here to present all sides of the argument in a fair way. And people are actually pretty good at that. Not everybody.

15:07And some people find it very uncomfortable. And some people are good at it in some areas and not in other areas. I mean my personal example is I don't ever attempt to edit anything about Donald Trump because the man makes me insane and I couldn't be a good Wikipedian. But broadly, there are people who are quite good at it and who do work to achieve neutrality. And so is it perfect? No. It can be imperfect because people aren't even realizing that they're being biased because they haven't really heard any other perspectives. It can be imperfect because of very – if there's something that's very emotional, that makes it a lot harder.

15:47So where I see problems around neutrality is generally if there's a war on, particularly if Wikipedians have been killed and things like that, yeah, we're human beings. Like it's hard. even when we have a commitment, even when the community wants to be neutral, yeah, it's kind of hard to hold on to that in those times. And so, you know, the idea that, as Elon says, Wikipedia has become Wokipedia. No, it hasn't. Like, I know the Wikipedians. I read Wikipedia a lot and say, look, that's just not true. I mean, one sort of little example, there's a classic kind of gotcha question around the whole trans issue.

16:31What is a woman? And I don't know what they think the answer is going to be, but somebody started coming at me with this question on X, you know, and I was like, and I knew a little bit about this, but, you know, and the answer, there was like a right-wing documentary about this and like the big punchline is a woman is an adult human female. And they did get some people on that documentary who are not quite willing to go there and say it and sort of waffled in this and that but i'm like i can just tell you what it says in wikipedia adult human female like then further down in the article of course it addresses like the questions of trans and that there's a social question and issues and it's all like yeah that's fine like i'm like if you're coming at me over that one i'm like yeah we've not become you know crazy woke on the other hand if you say yeah look wikipedia has problems of bias i'm like yeah actually i think we probably do and i think that's something we always have to have you know to examine and to be open about you know in my in my book that just came out seven rules of trust one of the ones i think is really really important particularly in my personal context at this moment in time is uh be transparent even when you have something to hide and you know sometimes like the comms team at the wikimedia foundation get a little uncomfortable with the way I approach this, but I'm like, no, like if we just go with a PR front and say, no, we have absolutely no problems with bias.

17:55If you think that's wrong, that's because you're a right-wing lunatic. Yeah, no, that's not the right way to answer it. The right way to answer is to go, yeah, you know what? Actually, there's a few areas where I don't think we quite live up to it. I think we need to work on that. There are definitely areas where the media is biased, and therefore Wikipedia ends up reflecting that. How severe is that? Good. Let's debate that. I don't know. Usually what I find is that when the media is very biased on an issue, the Wikipedians tend to tone that down. So actually we're better than the New York Times if the New York Times is pursuing an agenda or something.

18:33But it's complicated and it's quite hard. And actually, you know, there's a lot of detail under the surface. You know, like one of the problems that we have right now is a lot of the right-wing media is quite independently of being right-wing, also low quality. And that's a problem. If you're really being serious and thoughtful and you say, okay, right, I've got a story in the New York Times and the Washington Post, and I've got a story in Breitbart, you're not going to go, well, those are about equal. One of them is actually not very good. It's like tabloidy and sort of lots of misleading information and a lot of polemics and so on.

19:12And the other are, yeah, slightly left-leaning newspapers, which you can grapple with, you know? So that's Raman. So my thing, if I, you know, say to Elon, like, why don't you fund a newspaper? You know, like a serious intellectual effort to put forward the ideas that you agree with. That would be far more helpful to the world than beating on me. So we live in a kind of era of fake news and there's a lot of concern about trust in AI. How do you feel about where we're going with AI and whether people can trust it? How can we learn from Wikipedia to foster more trust? Yeah. So, I mean, huge question.

19:49There's so many different elements to that. So, you know, clearly right now there's a problem with AI and trust because of the hallucination issue, which is still quite severe. and uh you know as new models come out uh you know sam altman is i would say a bit of an i like sam i know sam but he'll he'll say things like this is unbelievable we've solved the hallucination i'm not sure he's ever said we've solved it but he'll he'll hint in that direction i'm like oh great that sounds fantastic and then i start using i'm like yeah actually it's still bullshit it's like i my latest uh which will only really make sense i think to british people um it's like a it's it's very intelligent very knowledgeable a complete bullshitter i'm like it's a 21 year old boris johnson's gonna hire him as an intern i think most of the english

20:42Cameron:upper class and uh you know and so i think you had a great example of a hallucination if um when we when we had you at uh at our event giant ideas if you could share that one oh yeah yeah yeah So, I mean, one of my favorite things to do, and I think if I keep talking about it, it'll get into the training data and then it'll ruin it. But is every new AI model that I test, and I do a lot of local AI because I'm really fascinated by what's going on in the open source world. And I always ask, who is Kate Garvey, my wife? And she's kind of perfect for this because she's not a famous person, but she is known to a degree.

21:22And she worked for Tony Blair for 10 years and she promotes the sustainable development goals and she's been in the press a little bit here and there but not a famous person. And so it always sort of BSes and it says things that are generally quite plausible but not true. So once it said that she set up a nonprofit organization. True. To promote women's empowerment in the workplace. Definitely not true, but it sounds like Kate. And that she did this with Miriam Gonzalez, who's Nick Clegg's wife, which we know. I mean, I know Nick because of Meta and we've worked together on whatever there. And our kids go to the same school, like whatever, small town London.

22:13And I showed Kate this and she's like, wow, like that could have happened. Like, like have we been sitting together at a dinner party, you know, at a certain time? Like that could have actually happened. And that's typically it. Typically it's things that are plausible. And then I always the next question I ask is, and who did she marry?

22:30Cameron:Yeah. And that's also generally plausible. It's because she worked in politics and is sort of a London person. It's generally members of parliament or political journalists in the UK. But my favorite is actually not that plausible, I would say. It said that she married Peter Mandelson. And I said to – this was ChatGPT – and I said, but isn't Peter Mandelson quite famously gay? And then it got very woke with me and it's not appropriate to speculate about people's personal sex lives. And gay people can get married in the United Kingdom. And I was like, yeah, okay, not really my point. But amazing.

23:09Cameron:It's going to be like the Jimmy Wales test, like the Turing test. So, yeah. So when you say that and you think, okay, wow, could Wikipedians use Chagibut to help write Wikipedia? It's like, well, no. So like if you say, you know, write an encyclopedia article about Taylor Swift, who is a famous person, it actually – you know, it's actually not bad, although there will be a few zingers in there in my experience. But if you – the more obscure the topic, the more likely it is to hallucinate. And we don't need help writing about Taylor Swift. We've got that covered. You know, it's the more obscure things.

23:48It's actually I recently looked and I don't know how often they update, but I looked at Grokipedia. Kate Garvey has an intro. I was checking because she just got an OBE, like a British honor. And Wikipedia was updated not because it was her but because we have some obsessives who when the list comes out, they immediately go and update everybody. So Wikipedia was updated within a couple of hours. I was like, oh, I wonder how quickly they will pick that up. And they didn't pick it up. But also it's the first time I'd actually read it. And it was wild. It was much longer than the Wikipedia entry, sort of longer than it should be because she's not a famous person.

24:23Cameron:Yeah. But further down, it started to go on and on sort of in a very AI sort of way about there's not much known about her private life because she's not a very public person. Yeah. Which means you can stop now because you're an encyclopedia. And then it linked that to the sort of message discipline and the secrecy of the Blair administration. And I'm like, yeah, it's really not got anything to do with that. It's just like she's not famous. It's just like her personal life isn't of much interest to anybody. So anyway, at the same time, I think we have to say like anything you say about AI today, in six months' time, you really have to reevaluate.

25:10Sure, sure. And certainly, you know, when I look at it and I'm playing with things, particularly once you give yourself a huge token budget and you don't just do a simple chat bot where you ask the question, but you actually sort of in an agentic way, you go through multiple passes to improve and so on. I think it's interesting. And I think there's more and more use cases that the Wikipedia community might find helpful.