Elon Musk has unveiled Grokipedia, his own version of Wikipedia, the crowdsourced online encyclopedia. Grokipedia has entries edited by xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence company, and according to the billionaire, the platform would focus on the “truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”
Musk had earlier accused Wikipedia of being full of “propaganda” and asked that people stop donating to the site, which is run by the Wikimedia Foundation, a nonprofit.
Wikipedia, which started 25 years ago, has over 7 million articles in English while the Grokipedia site now has about 885,000 articles, with a search bar where people can input their questions or search for numerous articles or topics.
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Wikipedia is written and edited by volunteers, and even though Grokipedia relies on the xAI model for its entries, some articles are sourced from Wikipedia. Entries on Musk’s platform are also not always sourced adequately while Wikipedia urges its volunteer writers or editors to cite a primary source on almost every sentence or paragraph.
Grokipedia users can see an article’s edit history, like Wikipedia. However, unlike Wikipedia users who can directly edit a story, Grokipedia provides tools to ask questions and submit a correction.
Already, Wikipedia’s entries are used to train A.I. systems. “This human-created knowledge is what AI companies rely on to generate content; even Grokipedia needs Wikipedia to exist,” said the Wikimedia Foundation on Tuesday.
“Unlike newer projects, Wikipedia’s strengths are clear: it has transparent policies, rigorous volunteer oversight, and a strong culture of continuous improvement. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, written to inform billions of readers without promoting a particular point of view,” the foundation added in a statement.
