Explained | What is Grokipedia, Musk's AI alternative to human-edited Wikipedia

For more than 25 years, Wikipedia has been the go-to place for children and adults for information on everything from technology to history, dinosaurs, science, and more on the internet. However, it also faces criticism among many users is that Wikipedia is a bit too open, for anybody to contribute to articles.

One major complaint is that most contributors have one-sided ideologies and often are accused of distorting facts in geopolitics and academic topics.

Multi-billionaire Elon Musk is one of the most vocal critics of Wikipedia, claiming it has lost its objectivity and is politically biased. He had the same issue with Jack Dorsey's Twitter platform and acquired it for a whopping $44 billion.

Unlike what he did with Twitter and changing its name to X, Musk has set up his own Grokipedia, an alternative to Wikipedia now.

Grokipedia: Here's what you need to know about Elon Musk's alternative to Wikipedia

Grokipedia is developed by Musk's AI firm xAI, the makers of generative Artificial Intelligence bot Grok AI.

It is an online encyclopedia, and the repository is getting filled at a rapid, pace thanks to the Grok AI. The latter, like on the X platform, can scrape information on the internet faster and promises to deliver reliable and accurate results.

Grokipedia was launched earlier this week, on October 27. At the time of reporting, it now has a little over 885,275 articles in its repository.

One of X users had asked Grok AI what differentiates Grokipedia from Wikipedia, it said-- "Grokpedia leverages xAI's Grok to synthesize knowledge from diverse sources, prioritising maximum truth-seeking over consensus-driven editing. Wikipedia, by contrast, depends on volunteer editors whose biases—often left-leaning—can distort entries on controversial topics. Grokpedia minimizes human subjectivity, focusing on verifiable facts and logical reasoning for a more reliable reference. Version 0.1 already outperforms Wikipedia in neutrality, with rapid improvements ahead."

The Wikipedia community too, has reacted with a message in its Grokipedia article.

"Wikipedia's knowledge is – and always will be – human. [...] This human-created knowledge is what AI companies rely on to generate content; even Grokipedia needs Wikipedia to exist," said the spokesperson of the Wikipedia Community.

"The jury's still out as to whether it's actually better than Wikipedia. But at this point, I would have to say 'maybe!," said Larry Sanger, co-founder, Wikipedia, while commending Grokipedia for correct and interesting content on him, not found in the corresponding Wikipedia article.

It remains to be seen whether Grokipedia will gain enough traction among Internet users to make Wikipedia lose its relevance in the new-age Gen AI era.

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