Elon Musk launched Grokipedia on Monday night. The new online encyclopedia uses AI-generated articles to compete with Wikipedia. According to Forbes, Musk claims the platform offers an alternative to what he calls Wikipedia’s bias.
Platform Features and Scale
Musk announced version 0.1 of Grokipedia in a post on X. He said version 1.0 will be ten times better. At launch, Grokipedia has over 885,000 articles. Wikipedia has 7 million articles.
Wikipedia uses human authors and editors. Grokipedia relies entirely on xAI’s Grok AI to generate and fact-check content. Users cannot edit articles directly. But Musk said users can ask Grok to add, modify, or delete articles. The AI will either make the change or explain why it won’t.
Content Sources and Attribution
Many Grokipedia articles include a disclaimer at the bottom. It states the content is adapted from Wikipedia under Creative Commons license. Some articles on PlayStation 5, Lamborghini, and AMD appeared nearly identical to Wikipedia entries. Musk said he knows about this issue. He added that it should be fixed by the end of the year.
Musk stated the goal is to seek the truth. He wrote that Grokipedia will never be perfect but will strive toward accuracy.
Industry Response
The Wikimedia Foundation runs Wikipedia. It shared a statement with multiple outlets. The foundation said Wikipedia’s knowledge is and always will be human. It noted that AI companies rely on human-created knowledge to generate content. Even Grokipedia needs Wikipedia to exist, the statement said.
The foundation added that many experiments to create alternative versions of Wikipedia have happened before. These efforts do not interfere with Wikipedia’s work or mission.
Last month, Musk announced plans to build Grokipedia. He called it a necessary step toward xAI’s goal of understanding the universe. White House AI czar David Sacks criticized Wikipedia in a post. He claimed Wikipedia is biased. Sacks said left-wing activists maintain the site and fight reasonable corrections. Musk then labeled Wikipedia as wokepedia and promoted posts from other critics.
