Elon Musk Announces Grokipedia, an AI-Powered Encyclopedia to Rival Wikipedia

Elon Musk has announced a new project, tentatively named Grokipedia. The entrepreneur's vision is to create an internet encyclopedia that operates on principles fundamentally different from those of Wikipedia.

The announcement was prompted by a public exchange on the social network X between Musk and investor David O. Sacks, who criticized Wikipedia for its alleged bias and the frequent editing of its articles. Agreeing with Sacks, Musk added that the problem is exacerbated by the fact that Wikipedia's content is often used to train large language models (AI).

Unlike Wikipedia's crowdsourcing model, which relies on edits from millions of volunteers, Grokipedia will be built on the technology of the Grok chatbot from xAI. According to Musk, this AI will analyze information from a multitude of sources—including Wikipedia itself, books, and various websites—and generate what he calls "synthetic revisions." The aim is to filter out factual errors and, in the creators' view, ideologically slanted content.

Musk's dissatisfaction with Wikipedia is nothing new. He has previously criticized the frequent editing of articles and has had public disagreements with the encyclopedia's founder, Jimmy Wales, over its neutrality. The billionaire has also been displeased with how his own biography is presented on the platform. It's worth noting that Wikipedia itself has faced challenges in implementing AI; a past project to create AI-generated articles was shelved due to editor concerns and reputational risks.

Technology experts are pointing to potential pitfalls in Musk's approach. They warn that automatically rewriting information with an algorithm could introduce new distortions, and the criteria for selecting "objective" information remain vague. For now, Grokipedia exists only as a concept, with no specific timeline announced for a working product or its technical implementation.