The Chaser Report - What a Grok!

Episode Date: November 4, 2025

Elon Musk has launched Grokipedia: an AI-generated online encyclopedia the billionaire hopes will challenge Wikipedia, which he says is more like ‘Wokepedia’ and full of propaganda. Charles and Dom investigate Grokipedia by of course first looking up themselves and how it treats The Chaser organisation (and Nazism).Order the 2025 CHASER ANNUAL: https://chasershop.com/products/the-chaser-and-the-shovel-annual-2025-preorderListen AD FREE: https://thechaserreport.supercast.com/ Follow us on Instagram: @chaserwarSpam Dom's socials: @dom_knightSend Charles voicemails: @charlesfirthEmail us: [e-mail] CEO’s Super-yacht upgrade Fund: https://chaser.com.au/support/ Send complaints to: [e-mail] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gatigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to The Jacer Report with Dom and Charles. Charles, it's happened. Elon Musk has finally launched Grocopedia. Oh, yes. Answering the question that nobody wanted to ask, which was, what would happen if you used a famously unreliable AI to write an entire encyclopedia?

Imagine how much computing power. Imagine how much energy. was used to do, I think it's 800,000 articles or something like that, for Grogapedia. But isn't the point that it's just literally scraped Wikipedia? Like, my understanding is half the entries are just literally mild rewrites of Wikipedia. A lot of them look extremely similar. But there is one big difference between Wikipedia and Grogapedia when it comes to the chaser, which I'll talk to in just a second.

Oh, brilliant. All right. Oh. Now, it's all been launched, and Elon Musk is... And so just to explain to people who don't know what Grocopedia is. So Elon Musk was running out of money, didn't know how to sort of make money out of Twitter, right? He'd bought it for $44 billion. And was destroying Tesla's value constantly.

And so what he did is he went, oh, no, no, actually Twitter isn't a failed media company that's been driven into the ground by my erratic. management. It's actually an AI company. What I'm going to do is I'm going to set up a separate company that leverages all the sort of value and traffic of Twitter and call it GROC and will integrate that company's work, the AI, into Twitter, and will ruin Twitter and make a sort of right-wing version of reality. Yeah, and there's now X, so there's Twitter is, Twitter is now X, and there's XAI, which is his version of meta or whatever, but much worse. Or chat GPT.

And by the other thing that he did completely illegally, but apparently the law doesn't hugely matter in American corporate life anymore, is he had bought about 100,000 H-100 GPU processes, which is the sort of underlying technology that Nvidia has created, that that every AI company needs to buy. And he'd bought 100,000 of them for Tesla, right? Tesla had bought those things. And he just diverted most of those processes, like I think it was like 100,000 of them into this new company

and just literally stole 100,000 H-100 processes, each of which cost about $25,000. And which were being used, which were supposed to be used for Tesla's self-driving. and all that kind of stuff, and the humanoid robot. Bearing in mind that, other than Elon Musk, there's no corporate overlap, really, between X and Tesla. No, no, they're completely...

Tesla's a listed company. Yeah, because Elon Musk just needed, like, everything was failing in his life, except for the skyrocketing chair prices. But, like, Tesla is a failing company. Twitter is a failing company. And so what do you do when you're running a bunch of failing companies? you spin up another company to prop up the previous company.

And at that time, it was incredibly hard to get any of these AI processes because of the kind of arms race that was going on. Anyway, I'm sure you won't read any of that context on Grogoppedia. But please, do go on about Gropedia. So Grogoppedia. So, Grogapedia is the sort of part of Elon Musk's irritation with AI is that everyone, I mean, right back in 2012, when they came up with the idea of attention,

everything, right? And Elon Musk was part of the early days of open AI, too. The first thing that they did to train the AI up to see whether this idea worked, which was that you didn't have to teach an AI grammar or context or anything, you just had to feed it a huge amount of data and teach it how to come up with the statistical likelihood of what the next word in a sentence is likely to be. So it inferred grammar and inferred all the knowledge. And it led to the amazing insight that I think is truly groundbreaking and deserves a Nobel Prize,

which is that across all languages, the most important thing to know is what statistically the most important word in a sentence is. And humans have a brilliant ability to know that. Like if I say, I'm about to murder Dom with a knife, you would know that statistically the words I'm and about, about to, and not as important as murder and knife. No, the most important word of that said, this is me. Oh, Dom. Yeah, yeah. It's certainly to me.

Anyway, go murder someone else. Point is, the first thing that they, the first thing that they did back in 2012 when they came up with this theory is they fed a third of the English language version of Wikipedia into the AI. Because it's open source. Yeah, because it's open source to see what it would do. And it became, instantly, it started spouting back basically sentences that made sense. And they went, oh, we're on to a thing.

Interesting side note that a third of Wikipedia is an incredibly small amount of training data compared to what they're training the AIs on now, which is interesting because they couldn't do the whole of Wikipedia because it was just too much data at the time. How funny. Yeah. Anyway. But I mean, I'm very confident that the large language,

models, chat chapit and so on, would rank Wikipedia very highly in terms of the, because all the sources that they have, they rank the reliability of. And we know this is one of the reasons why they're as accurate as they are, because they can discern whether they've been told manually or not. Probably they have been told manually the things that are reliable and things that aren't. But Elon Musk is very pissed off with Wikipedia because it represents a sort of version of the truth that has been moderated by things like facts. and science and evidence.

And there's a whole idea that you actually have to source, you know, claims in Wikipedia, which... I'll stop you there. Wokepedia. Wokipedia. Facts are woke, apparently. So anyway, so then Elon Musk is basically ripped off Gropedipedia, but wants to inject into it a sort of right-wing slant

that does away with pesky things like facts. So they actually invited it. an academic to review, quite a few academics, to review how good it was. And this actually happened. And one of the people who did, guy called Richard Evans, so Richard Evans, who's an extremely eminent historian, went through and actually looked at Grochoppedia and found out that just a lot of facts, even about himself, were completely false.

Yes. And that Grocopedia, unlike Chatch EPT, seems to rank anything from, a Reddit chat room or anything, anything you can find on the internet as being equally reliable as source, proper, factual. That's hilarious. Yeah, that's what he found. So there are a huge number of, this guy, this historian, Richard Evans, in his crockapedia entry, it included things such as he produced three expert witnesses for

the Holocaust denier of David Irving, all these things. He was Regis Professor at History at Cambridge and supervised DCs on Bismarck's social policy, none of which were true at all. So does this mean we could hack Grockapedias methodology simply by setting up a subreddit called, you know, true facts? True facts. Yes, you should. And then just writing stuff about how Charles Firth has won a Nobel Peace Prize.

Yes, probably couldn't. Actually, the transcript for this podcast is probably enough. Well, it actually, clearly there's a bit of Chaser report that's fed it. The entry on the Chaser is incredibly long. Okay. And most, I'd say about 80% of it's factual, but a lot of it's completely wrong, like that time that we all went to the University of New South Wales together. But I mean, in this example, it's quite fascinating.

So the most obvious example, just to explain the flaws, is Albert Speer, you know, Hitler's architect and who did munitions for him during the war and that sort of stuff. He produced a sanitised version of his own history to try and exonerate himself from his involvement in the Third Reich. And historians, I went through and went, no, that's all lies. This guy was absolutely part of it, et cetera, et cetera. But Grocopedia didn't do that.

It replicated Spears' version of the story. Oh, brilliant. So there's just, basically, it's not Nazi proof, is what I'm saying. Well, I think that's by design. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that's how you make sure it's not Wokopedia. And there's lots of things in the Chaser entry that we would rather weren't there. Right.

Lots and certainly lots of criticism of the Chaser from right-wing sources. Oh, fantastic. About how woke everybody is and so on, which is probably slightly fairer. Yeah. But the funny thing about Rockapedia is that as of this moment, Charles, as of this point in its evolution, we are the only two members of the Chaser who do not have an entry. So Craig Rucastel, of course, Chris Taylor, Charles Chasdalo, Andrew Hanson, Julian Morrow,

all have entries. Our role, some might say, seminal role in starting the group, is noted in the Chaser entry. But we're chopped liver to Grogoppedia. And given your success of the past 12 months, you're storming of the comedy world with Wankanomics. Yeah, is Wankanomics part of the... It's probably just a James Schleffel thing.

Well, James Schleffle is mentioned in the history of the Chaser. It has a great difficulty working out what's Chaser and what isn't. For instance, the war on 2022, et cetera, a very successful Chaser production, which I'm sure some of our colleagues will be delighted to hear. Very strange. So, yeah, so we are... Oh, but it's all right.

Like, I've just looked it up. It's fine because I may not be in there, but neither is my sister. Oh, brilliant. That's so good. So Verity Firth, A.M. Sorry, the Honourable Professor Verity Firth, AM, not yet in Gropedite. Well, that's something. Yeah, that's good.

So who, who's the sort of person who we hate the most, probably Craig. I mean, the Craig's entry is very worthy. It's worth noting. Like, all of his... Does it criticize it? Maybe I'll become a fan of Grocopedia. All of his attempts to save the world are exhaustively noted. But there's also a lot of criticism of him.

There was one article last year, anonymous article about him that is extensively quoted with his radio career. So, yeah, it's incredibly long. The entries are really, because it's AI, and it's actually doing things that no human would bother to go and write about in detail. This is the thing. Yes. Does it mention Craig's two-season?

hosting of Bulls of Steel Australia? I don't know. That's a great question. If not, let's hope that mentioning here is enough to get it on the list there. But most of it is about his environmental work. There's not that much about his time as a satyrus. It's got a lot of him, you know, his environmental credentials, which I mean, I must say, with all due respect to Craig,

probably not the main point of his career today. Is it that maybe it is? So I'm looking To be clear, it is very boring It's so boring There also don't seem to be any hyperlinks This makes So you can't

It was fact checked by GROC last month So there is work to be done is my point Well maybe not Maybe it's perfect The end of history The Chaser Report More news Less often

What Elon Musk wants to do In the longer term And this is brilliant being Elon, of course, with everything he takes it to extremes. He plans someday to etch the whole of Grogapedia as the definitive collection of human knowledge into a stable oxide, wherever that means, and place copies in orbit on the moon and on Mars

to preserve all human knowledge for the future. Oh, isn't that? From Grogoppedia. He's just thinking, he's just worthy, isn't he? He's just thinking of other people. So kind. He's such a... It's not a product of... his unbelievable narcissism that he wants to just...

I'm the author of all of humanity's knowledge, yeah. I mean, it does mention... Is there an entry on narcissism? That's a great question. But how long's his entry? I hate to think. The first incorrect fact in the entry on the chaser is that the newspaper came out fortnightly.

I mean, that was only very theoretical. That was an aspirational target. It was. That was a bit like net zero for the nationals or something. Absolutely. The E-Lon entry is not that much longer than the Craig entry. Well, I think it's about South African expats All right

Well, what else can we look up on Grogapedia that Well, what about Nazism? What does it say about Nazism? Oh, that seems great question, Nazism. Okay. Nazism. Nazism is... This is only version 0.1.

So I'm sure once I guess it's a word version 1 that'll have an entry, at least on you. Well, it's very, let's just say, balanced in its approach to Nazis. It's just very, it's just the ideology. outlined in NSDPAs, you know, the National Socialist German Workers' Party's 25-point program of 1920 demanded the unification of all ethnic Germans into a greater Reich, the abrogation of the Treaty of Versailles, the exclusion of Jews from citizenship, confiscation of war profits nationalisation.

It doesn't, at any point, say, it's bad, it's just reporting the facts, reporting the facts. GROC has an AI, certainly on social media is quite fun. I do like the fact that you can ask GROC questions on X. But people ask it opinion-based questions. It does. It's like, is Elon Musk good-looking or something like that? And people will think that somehow constitutes reality or truth. I asked it how many children Elon Musk would need to have

to make it basically certain that he would have a child born on every day of the year. And I think that number was two and a half thousand or so. See, this is where statistics gets very counterintuitive. isn't it? Yeah. Or maybe it was more likely than not. Anyway. No, no, no, but maybe the point is we should talk about truth

and how we live in a post-truth world, Dom. Like maybe that's where this episode lives. We could talk about that. Or we could look at another truth, Charles. Oh, yeah. The other truth that I want to mention is that we're really behind on doing enough episodes for the daily podcast. And given that we've done 15 minutes,

I think it's time to stop. So save your post truth for next time. No, let's not worry about it. I'm sure it'll sort itself out. Yeah, we can just look it up on Grochapedia. Yeah, just wait until it gets to version 1.0. Yeah. I'm sure it'll all be fixed in post.

Okay. We're part of the Iconiclac network and the Chaser Report. Hey, the Chaser Report comes up on Grogopedia. Does it say that we're daily? Because that's also another misleading thing. No, no, we'll be back to daily from now on, I'm sure, for a while at least. At least until your next holiday slash important work trip to the UK. Well, I'm basically on a break till February, so yeah, great.

Yeah, I'll see some podcasting. Okay, see you. Well, you could actually have a holiday. No, podcasting. Podcasting.