Elon Musk launches ‘Grokipedia’ as AI-powered rival to Wikipedia
Elon Musk has launched Grokipedia, an AI-driven encyclopedia developed by his startup xAI as a rival to Wikipedia. The platform uses Musk's chatbot Grok to "fact-check" articles instead of relying on human editors.
New Delhi: Elon Musk has released Grokipedia, a new online encyclopedia that was developed by his AI company xAI. This site is run by Grok. Musk criticised Wikipedia as a site that was awakened and politically partisan. According to the billionaire, Grokipedia is a move towards developing an AI-powered view of knowledge about the universe, asserting that it would provide a more balanced method of sharing knowledge.
However, as opposed to Wikipedia, which is supported by millions of volunteer editors, the articles featured in Grokipedia are even said to be fact-checked by the AI model itself. The visitor has no right to edit entries; however, there is a pop-up form to propose corrections. Other initial posts seem to have been based on Wikipedia and contain disclaimers giving the Creative Commons licence. But Musk claimed that by the end of 2025, he will stop using Wikipedia.
AI fact checked knowledge base
The interface of Grokipedia resembles the simple design of Wikipedia with a search box in the centre and organised content with headings and references. The site has approximately 885,000 articles, a small compartment of 7.1 million English words within Wikipedia, and is labelled ‘version 0.1’, indicating that it is under construction. Other articles, like that of Donald Trump and that of Musk himself, are markedly different than Wikipedia ones, not mentioning controversial information like Trump venturing into cryptocurrencies or Musk giving a Nazi-like salute.
Wikimedia responds to Musk’s challenge
The Wikimedia Foundation that manages Wikipedia stated that it is looking into how Grokipedia operates but emphasised that Wikipedia knowledge is and continues to be human. The foundation stressed that AI models such as Grok are prone to human-made content in order to train and produce an answer. Although Grokipedia markets itself as the future of AI-powered information, researchers fear that the use of machine fact-checking as its basis undermines the accuracy and impartiality of information.