Elon Musk has launched Grokipedia, a crowdsourced online encyclopedia that the billionaire seeks to position as a rival to Wikipedia.
Writing on social media, Musk said that Grokipedia.com is “now live” and its goal is the “truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”
Musk has previously criticized Wikipedia for being filled with “propaganda” and called for people to stop donating to the site, which is run by a nonprofit. In September he announced that his artificial intelligence company xAI was working on Grokipedia.
The Grokipedia site has a minimalist appearance with little beyond a search bar where users can type in queries. It states that it has 885,279 articles. Wikipedia, meanwhile, says it has more than 7 million articles in English.
Like Wikipedia, users can search for articles on various topics such as Taylor Swift, the baseball World Series, or Buckingham Palace.
While Wikipedia is written and edited by volunteers, it’s unclear how exactly Grokipedia articles are put together. Reports suggest the site is powered by the same xAI model that underpins Musk’s Grok chatbot, but some articles are seemingly adapted from Wikipedia.
The San Francisco-based Wikimedia Foundation said in a statement Tuesday that it is “still in the process of understanding how Grokipedia works.”
As a huge trove of well-constructed sentences with little restriction on how it’s used, Wikipedia has been a key source used to train AI chatbots, including Grok’s rivals ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.
“This human-created knowledge is what AI companies rely on to generate content; even Grokipedia needs Wikipedia to exist,” said the Wikimedia Foundation.
Wikipedia for months has been a target of the political right. Republican lawmakers in the U.S. Congress launched an investigation in August of alleged “manipulation efforts” in Wikipedia’s editing process that they said could inject bias and undermine neutral points of view on its platform and the AI systems that rely on it.
Wikipedia encourages its volunteer editors to cite nearly every sentence or paragraph with a primary source, and sentences not verified can be challenged and removed. Some of Grokipedia’s entries are thinly sourced, such as an entry on the Chola Dynasty of southern India that has three linked sources, compared to Wikipedia’s that has 113 linked sources plus dozens of referenced books.
Grokipedia’s entry on Wikipedia accuses the site of having “systemic ideological biases — particularly a left-leaning slant in coverage of political figures and topics.”
The Wikimedia Foundation said in its statement Tuesday: “Unlike newer projects, Wikipedia’s strengths are clear: it has transparent policies, rigorous volunteer oversight, and a strong culture of continuous improvement. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, written to inform billions of readers without promoting a particular point of view.”
—Associated Press