Elon Musk plans to take on Wikipedia with his own rival encyclopedia site. On Tuesday, the Tesla CEO announced on X that his xAI startup is building Grokipedia, which he claims will be a “massive improvement” over Wikipedia. Musk has long criticized Wikipedia, accusing it of being “woke” and calling for it to be defunded. 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 ChatGPT. In a podcast earlier this month, Musk suggested that Grok is smart enough to replicate the work of human community volunteers who maintain and update Wikipedia, and to correct for any bias or inaccuracies. He said, “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. Now rewrite the page to correct, remove the falsehoods, correct the half-truths, and add the missing context.” However, Grok has suffered its own share of problems, including praising Hitler in the past.
A Challenging Road Ahead
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. Grokipedia will likely attract an audience of Musk supporters and right-wing commentators who also claim Wikipedia has a liberal bias. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, a prominent critic of Musk, has argued that the free online encyclopedia has focused on accuracy, whereas X has faced accusations that it has become a hub of misinformation. Wales has also criticized the changes Musk has made to Twitter after acquiring it, saying the platform had become “overrun by trolls and lunatics.” Last month, Musk 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.
What The Author Thinks
The plan for Grokipedia, with its reliance on a single AI model, is a fundamental philosophical challenge to Wikipedia’s model of decentralized, human-led community collaboration. While Wikipedia has its flaws, its open and transparent system of editing is a critical safeguard against bias and a valuable check on misinformation. A top-down, AI-generated encyclopedia, no matter how sophisticated the AI, risks concentrating the power of knowledge in the hands of a single entity, which could be a dangerous precedent for the future of information. This is a crucial battle for the future of knowledge, and it will determine whether we will continue to rely on a collaborative, human-centric model or a more centralized, AI-driven one.
Featured image credit: OnInnovation via Flickr
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