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Elon Musk’s Wikipedia alternative is slated to arrive in the next two weeks.
"Version 0.1 early beta of Grokipedia will be published in 2 weeks," the Tesla and SpaceX CEO tweeted on Sunday.
The phrasing suggests Musk is trying to keep expectations low. However, the billionaire is already promoting Grokipedia as superior to Wikipedia. Musk has accused the encyclopedia site of being “woke” and promoting falsehoods. In January, Musk also blasted Wikipedia for adding an entry about him allegedly making a Nazi-like salute at a Trump inauguration event.
Musk plans to build Grokipedia through his startup company xAI, which has already developed a ChatGPT rival with Grok. The company has trained Grok using public information on the internet, along with user tweets on X, which Musk also owns. In a bit of irony, though, Grok isn’t immune to errors, including generating hallucinations and praising Hitler.
Still, Musk says Grokipedia will be smart enough to “remove the falsehoods, correct the half-truths, and add the missing context” to its encyclopedia entries. However, the Grokpedia project is raising concerns that he’s building an encyclopedia site that’ll be favorable to his own viewpoints while undermining Wikipedia, which has long striven for accuracy from a neutral point of view by relying on human community volunteers.
“It's fucking scary to have powerful people profiting from the destruction of Wikipedia,” wrote one user on Reddit.
In the meantime, xAI posted a job listing for a "Member of Technical Staff, Grokipedia - Search/Retrieval." The job posting suggests Grokipedia will leverage AI to pull information from Grok’s training database to create the encyclopedia entries. The same AI will also be able to access and synthesize data, including text, images, video, and audio.
“To achieve this, we are developing AI-first search/retrieval systems that enable LLM [large language model] agents to efficiently access, process, and leverage vast knowledge bases — ultimately fostering agents that prioritize accuracy, rigorous reasoning, and an unbiased pursuit of knowledge,” the posting says.