Directly challenging the established world of online knowledge, Elon Musk’s company xAI launched Grokipedia on Monday, October 27.
Grokipedia is an AI-generated encyclopedia that developed its brand identity as a truth-seeking alternative to what Musk claims is a “left-biased” and “activist-controlled” Wikipedia.
As mentioned on the original site, “version 0.1” went live with more than 885,000 articles, which is only a fraction of Wikipedia’s more than seven million English-language entries.
However, Musk builds his hype by quoting on X (formerly Twitter) that “even at 0.1, it’s better than Wikipedia” and promising that “version 1.0 will be 10 times better.”
The launch builds on Musk’s years of criticism of Wikipedia. Musk has repeatedly claimed that the free, nonprofit online encyclopedia is actually run by “far-left activists” and has editorial content that is “extremely left-biased.”
The SpaceX CEO previously urged his supporters to fund it.
“The goal of Grok and Grokipedia is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. We will never be perfect, but we will strive to achieve this goal nonetheless,” he added.
This statement highlights a significant conflict in how knowledge is retained.
Wikipedia, founded in 2001, is supported by a global community of volunteers who write and edit articles following a strict “neutral point of view” policy. Wikipedia’s source of funding comes mainly from donations.
On the other hand, Grokipedia is fully curated and “verified” by xAI’s assistant, Grok. The approach is already criticized because AI-based models are known to “hallucinate” or make up facts,
For the moment, the site does not allow human editing unlike Wikipedia. But Musk said that eventually, Grokipedia will allow people to edit articles, with AI having the final say.
