If you’ve been through academic circles, you’ve often heard the claim that Wikipedia is not a reliable source of information. While this is usually because its articles are not peer-reviewed, some think that it’s because of political bias. Among those is Elon Musk, who declared last month that xAI will be building a counterpart called Grokipedia. It launched sometime yesterday, and “promptly crashed”, according to Engadget.
The site is live and stable now, at the time of writing, with the home page noting that it has over 885,000 article entries. Notably though, Musk said last week that the launch of Grokipedia v0.1 was delayed to “purge out the propaganda”. The report also notes that some articles are nearly identical to their Wikipedia counterparts. These come with a disclaimer that “the content is adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License”.
When Musk first said that xAI is building Grokipedia, he claimed that it was “a necessary step towards the xAI goal of understanding the Universe”. But perhaps more importantly, he says that it “will be a massive improvement over Wikipedia”, referring to the claimed political bias of the site.For what it’s worth, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has denied those claims.
But it wouldn’t take long to discover that Musk’s own Grokipedia fails on accounts of consistency, never mind bias. For instance, articles on Tesla and Musk on the site provide conflicting information. More specifically, the latter article claims that Musk was a Tesla founder. The former, on the other hand, points to Musk joining the company a year after its founding.
(Source: Grokipedia [1], [2], [3], Engadget, Elon Musk [1], [2], BBC)
