Tech billionaire Elon Musk on Monday launched an online encyclopedia, named Grokipedia, that he said was fueled by artificial intelligence and designed to be closer to his conservative political views than the leading alternative, Wikipedia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Musk announced last month that he was working on a Wikipedia rival after a suggestion from David Sacks, a friend and fellow tech investor who is the Trump administration\u2019s AI and crypto czar. Musk has described the project in political terms, attacking Wikipedia as \u201cwoke\u201d and criticizing it for citing news outlets such as The New York Times and NPR as sources in many of its articles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Musk said on X that an AI-generated encyclopedia would be \u201csuper important for civilization\u201d and a necessary step toward \u201cunderstanding the Universe.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Grokipedia\u2019s operation differs from Wikipedia\u2019s in at least one major respect: no clear human authors. While volunteers write and edit Wikipedia, often anonymously, Grokipedia says its articles were \u201cfact-checked\u201d by Grok, the AI chatbot from Musk\u2019s startup xAI. Visitors to Grokipedia cannot make edits, though they can suggest edits via a pop-up form for reporting wrong information.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At least initially, some Grokipedia entries say they are based on Wikipedia itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe content is adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License,\u201d a disclaimer says on the bottom of some but not all entries, including the one for the Nobel Prize in physics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Some Grokipedia entries, such as the one for Monday, appear to be word for word the same as the corresponding Wikipedia entries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Musk, though, has said he wants Grok to stop using Wikipedia pages as sources by the end of the year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There are some content differences between Grokipedia and Wikipedia. Grokipedia\u2019s entry for President Donald Trump, for example, includes no mention of Trump\u2019s accepting a luxury megajet from Qatar or his promotion of a Trump-themed cryptocurrency token, or meme coin, while Wikipedia\u2019s entry for Trump includes a section dedicated to conflicts of interests \u2014 including both the jet and the meme coin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Grokipedia entry for Musk includes no mention of his hand gesture at a rally in January that many historians and politicians viewed as a Nazi salute, while the Wikipedia entry for him has several paragraphs on the subject.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Wikimedia Foundation, which hosts Wikipedia, said Monday that it was in the process of understanding how Grokipedia works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWikipedia\u2019s knowledge is \u2014 and always will be \u2014 human,\u201d it said in a statement. \u201cThrough open collaboration and consensus, people from all backgrounds build a neutral, living record of human understanding \u2014 one that reflects our diversity and collective curiosity. This human-created knowledge is what AI companies rely on to generate content; even Grokipedia needs Wikipedia to exist.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The statement continued: \u201cMany experiments to create alternative versions of Wikipedia have happened before; it doesn\u2019t interfere with our work or mission.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Grokipedia project pits the world\u2019s wealthiest person, Musk, against one of the internet\u2019s most visited websites, Wikipedia. Wikipedia ranks No. 9 worldwide in visits, according to the data firm Similarweb, dwarfing older rivals such as Encyclopedia Britannica.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Wikipedia also represents an earlier, democratic vision for the open web, before giant tech platforms came to dominate and segment the internet. Founded in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, Wikipedia has remained a nonprofit operation with free content fueled mainly by enthusiasts. It’s also ad-free.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sanger, though, has for years been a critic of how Wikipedia operates, in particular its use of anonymous editors and what he views as a left-wing slant. Last month, he repeated his criticisms in an interview with online conservative talk show host Tucker Carlson, which Sacks then shared on X.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sacks and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Wikipedia says it has 7.1 million articles in English, while Grokipedia says it has 885,000 articles initially available. Grokipedia is labeled, though, as version 0.1, indicating many more updates to come.<\/p>\n\n\n\n