Elon Musk is at war with Wikipedia! The businessman, known for his companies Tesla, SpaceX and X (former Twitter), has launched a new and ambitious project called Grokipedia. What’s this now? It’s an encyclopaedia created with artificial intelligence that aims to compete against Wikipedia, the world’s most popular online reference site.
According to Musk, Grokipedia will be an ‘’improved version’’ of Wikipedia, with no censorship and no ‘’ideological bias’’ which he says are the things that affect current encyclopaedia. The announcement was made through his official X account and it’s part of his company of artificial intelligence xAI. So, let’s learn more about this.
Battle for knowledge
Elon Musk states that Wikipedia is no longer neutral. From his point of view, the encyclopaedia is controlled by a small group of editors that modify the articles according to their own political ideas. This is why he thinks it’s time to create an alternative that brings objectivity back to information on the internet.
The businessman considers that Grokipedia won’t be just a database or a website, but also a step forward xAI’s main goal: ‘’understand the universe’’.
It might seem exaggerated, but this ambition fits perfectly with Musk’s style, which has already revolutionized sectors like electric vehicles (with Tesla), space rockets (with SpaceX), and social networks (with X). Now, he wants to do the same with the most read encyclopaedia on the planet: Wikipedia.
Elon Musk vs. Wikipedia
Musk’s criticism against Wikipedia is not something new. Years ago, he openly expressed his distrust toward the platform. Musk states that it’s run by activist editors, many of whom he claims lean politically to the left. According to him, they distort key articles to promote their ideological agendas. He has even mocked Wikipedia’s name by calling it ‘’Wokepedia’’, taking the term ‘woke’ as reference, ironically to describe politically progressive attitudes.
In one instance, Musk offered to donate $1 billion to the Wikimedia Foundation (which runs Wikipedia) if it changed its name to something offensive. Needless to say, the offer was rejected. What’s more, Musk has also questioned the site’s funding model, wondering why it constantly asks for donations if maintaining a full copy of Wikipedia is, in his opinion, not that expensive.
All of this shows a growing distrust toward traditional knowledge organizations — and Musk now wants to move from criticism to action with Grokipedia.
What’s Grokipedia in detail?
For now, we know little about how Grokipedia is going to work, but the name offers some clues like the word ‘Grok’:
- It comes from the science-fiction novel from the 60s: Stranger in a Strange Land, where it means “to understand deeply.”
- It’s also the name of the xAI’s chatbot, included in the social network X and designed to compete with tools like ChatGPT.
So, Grokipedia would be an encyclopaedia boosted by artificial intelligence and able to generate, organize, and automatically update knowledge. The idea is that language models developed by xAI, the same that Grok uses, can write articles about any issue (probably with some human supervision).
This way Grokipedia would be a mix of an encyclopaedia and a conversational assistant, where users look for information and interact with it, correct it, or update it in real time.
Wikipedia and the role of artificial intelligence
The announcement of Grokipedia arrives at a crucial moment for the debate about artificial intelligence and public knowledge. Big companies from the sector (like OpenAI, Google DeepMind, or Anthropic) train their models with great amounts of texts and… what’s their main source of information? Exactly, Wikipedia!
This basically means that the current encyclopaedia directly influences how artificial intelligences ‘’think’’ since they learn from the texts they collect.
An unbiased encyclopaedia, is this possible?
The answer is not simple: each artificial intelligence model is trained with data created by people and human beings always have opinions, beliefs, or ways to see the world. This is why, even if Musk removes biases he considers ‘’left-leaning’’, he could easily introduce new biases of his own.
So, there’s no such thing as completely objective knowledge — only different ways of interpreting reality.