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Elon Musk plans to take on Wikipedia with his own rival encyclopedia site.
On Tuesday, the Tesla CEO tweeted that his xAI startup is building Grokipedia, which he claims will be a “massive improvement” over Wikipedia. Musk has long had a gripe with Wikipedia, accusing it of being “woke” and even calling for it to be defunded. (The encyclopedia site has long relied on donations.) In January, Musk also railed at Wikipedia for adding an entry about him allegedly making a Nazi-like salute at a Trump inauguration event.
To create Grokipedia, Musk plans on tapping xAI's Grok chatbot (which he also created as an alternative to another technology he didn't like, ChatGPT). Grok has been trained on web data, including public tweets. In a podcast earlier this month, Musk suggested that Grok is smart enough not only to replicate the work of human community volunteers who maintain and update Wikipedia, but also to account for any bias or inaccuracies.
“Grok is using heavy amounts of inference compute to look at, as an example, a Wikipedia page, what is true, partially true, or false, or missing in this page,” he said. "Now rewrite the page to correct, remove the falsehoods, correct the half-truths, and add the missing context.” (That said, Grok has suffered its own share of problems, including praising Hitler.)
Musk’s Tuesday tweet didn’t say when Grokipedia would launch. But it’ll likely attract an audience of Musk supporters and right-wing pundits who also claim Wikipedia has a liberal bias.
Wikipedia has faced internal conflicts among community editors over how certain events are portrayed. However, Musk's critics, including Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, argue that the free online encyclopedia has focused on accuracy, whereas Musk's X has faced accusations that it's a hub of misinformation. In 2023, Wales also criticized the changes that Musk made to Twitter after acquiring it, saying the platform had become “overrun by trolls and lunatics.”
Beating Wikipedia won’t be easy; the free online encyclopedia is the seventh most-visited website in the world. Still, Musk is betting he can disrupt the status quo. Last month, the billionaire also tweeted his plan to take on Microsoft by creating a new business called “Macrohard” dedicated to releasing rival software products with the help of AI.