Oct. 28 (UPI) — Tech mogul Elon Musk launched his own online encyclopedia with his company xAI, calling it Grokipedia as a rival to the non-profit Wikipedia.
Grokipedia, named for xAI’s chatbot Grok, uses Wikipedia as its source and it’s modeled like Wikipedia. But it has sanitized versions of pages about Musk, reporting nothing critical of him. The page says it has 885,279 pages.
The venture launched on Monday, with the site initially crashing then coming back online later. It has been reported by Musk as an improved and less biased version of Wikipedia.
Republican lawmakers and White House AI czar David Sacks have called Wikipedia “hopelessly biased.”
On X, Sacks said, “An army of left-wing activists maintain the bios and fight reasonable corrections. Magnifying the problem, Wikipedia often appears first in Google search results, and now it’s a trusted source for AI model training. This is a huge problem.”
The Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia, said in a statement last month, “Wikipedia informs; it does not persuade.”
“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,” Lauren Dickinson, a spokesperson for the Wikimedia Foundation, said in a statement.
“This human-created knowledge is what AI companies rely on to generate content; even Grokipedia needs Wikipedia to exist,” she added.
On Monday, Musk posted on X that the launch was “Grokipedia version 0.1,” but that “Version 1.0 will be 10X better, but even at 0.1 it’s better than Wikipedia imo.”