The goal of Elon Musk's AI-powered encyclopaedia, Grokipedia, is to provide a reliable substitute for Wikipedia.Billionaire Elon Musk has announced the official launch of Grokipedia.com, a new open-source online encyclopaedia developed by his artificial intelligence company, xAI.
The goal of this AI-powered encyclopaedia is to provide a reliable substitute for Wikipedia, and AI is used for fact-checking and content management.
"Grokipedia.com is fully open source, so anyone can use it for anything at no cost," Musk declared on X (formerly Twitter).
The platform launched on October 27, and initially offered over 800,000 articles.
Musk claimed that Grokipedia is meant to be a 'truthful and independent alternative' to Wikipedia, which he has previously referred to as 'Wokipedia' and publicly lambasted for editorial bias.
Announcing the launch of Grokipedia, Musk wrote on X, "Grokipedia.com version 0.1 is now live. Version 1.0 will be 10X better, but even at 0.1 it's better than Wikipedia imo."
The platform reportedly connects with xAI's Grok chatbot, which is already accessible to X premium customers and enables users to create, modify, and validate encyclopaedia entries with the help of AI-assisted tools.
In the Grokipedia project, Musk competes against Wikipedia, one of the most popular websites on the internet. Wikipedia surpasses more established competitors like Encyclopaedia Britannica in terms of visits, ranking ninth globally.
But it brings significant issues with editorial governance, accuracy, and trust. While Wikipedia is designed to be an open collaborative effort, Grokipedia's initial structure seems to have been more centrally regulated, with the Grok chatbot model verifying AI-generated content instead of a sizable volunteer editing community.
There is at least one significant difference between Grokipedia and Wikipedia: there are no obvious human authors, according to NBC News.
Grok, the AI chatbot from Musk's company xAI, reportedly 'fact-checked' the articles on Grokipedia, although volunteers write and maintain the site, often anonymously. Its users can report inaccurate information via a pop-up form, but they are unable to make changes themselves.
Some Grokipedia entries claim to be based on Wikipedia itself, at least at first glance.
Musk has also called Grokipedia "a necessary step towards the xAI goal of understanding the Universe and a massive improvement over Wikipedia."
Despite not using Wikipedia's customary in-line source linking, Grokkipedia's content is primarily copied from Wikipedia and is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0.
Accuracy and maintainability remain unknown, and the platform's capacity to handle Wikipedia's more than 7 million English-language pages has not been verified.
This has prompted concerns over sourcing and transparency. In several cases, social media users have already pointed out that the entries more overtly express Musk's personal perspective than Wikipedia articles.
Over the next few weeks, analysts will be keeping an eye on:
If Grokipedia will continue to be openly editable or turn into a closed, curated source.
How content from other sources is licensed and attributed by xAI.
If the openness or data-licensing models of Wikipedia and other legacy sites are strategically altered.
How the general IT community and the business view Grokipedia as a source of generative AI training data.