Elon Musk's xAI company has launched an alternative to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Version 0.1 of Grokipedia was launched on Monday and by evening included more than 885,000 articles. Wikipedia has more than seven million articles in English.
Musk announced that a new version 1.0 would be "ten times better" than the current site, which he said was already better than Wikipedia. However, users noticed that some of the text was based on Wikipedia articles. The technology blog The Verge referenced a Grokipedia article about Apple's MacBook Air, which it said was "adapted" from Wikipedia.
xAI is Musk's artificial intelligence (AI) company, founded in 2023, which has developed, among other things, the Grok chatbot. The content on Grokipedia is generated by AI and Grok. Grok 4 caused a strong reaction after anti-Semitic statements were made there, but Musk's company blamed faulty programming for this. Musk said that Grokipedia's goal is "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth." "We will never be perfect, but we should still strive for that goal," Elon Musk said. Grokipedia articles appear at the top of a note stating that they are subject to fact-checking by Grok. It remains unclear how this happens and which sources are used.
In general, artificial intelligence is known to provide information that sounds credible in the context of so-called hallucinations. Moreover, the information is often outdated, as a recent study by 22 media companies, including Deutsche Welle, found.
Elon Musk regularly criticizes Wikipedia. Last year, he claimed that the site was controlled by “far-left activists.” The tech billionaire also called on his followers to stop funding Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Foundation, which supports Wikipedia, recently wrote in a statement to The Verge: “We are still in the process of understanding how Grokipedia works.”
The online service Wikipedia was founded in 2001. Entries are created by volunteers and are publicly accessible. The non-profit Wikimedia Foundation operates the site, which is funded through donations./DW
