Musk challenges Wikipedia "woke" with launch of Grokipedia

Elon Musk unveiled Grokipedia on Monday Grokipedia, an artificial intelligence-powered digital encyclopedia that he said seeks to compete directly with Wikipedia, which the tycoon and various conservative critics have repeatedly accused of being too "woke" and maintaining a progressive bias in its content.

"Grokipedia.com version 0.1 is now live. Version 1.0 will be 10X better, but even at 0.1 it’s better than Wikipedia imo," Musk wrote in 'X' when officially announcingthe launch of the site, which will have, in principle, 885,000 articles available; six million fewer than Wikipedia.

Grokipedia, for all practical purposes, is an extension of the ecosystem of xAI, Musk's artificial intelligence company, and operates under a different model than Wikipedia.

While the global encyclopedia founded by Jimmy Wales relies on human and volunteer editors, Grokipedia says it relies on articles "verified" by Grok, the chatbot developed by the Musk company, which evaluates information and generates automated versions.

Unlike Wikipedia, users cannot directly edit articles on Grokipedia, but they can suggest corrections through a review form.

Some Grokipedia entries acknowledge having been adapted from Wikipedia itself under a Creative Commons license, although Musk assured that his goal is to eliminate that reliance on his competition before the end of the year.

The launch of Grokipedia is already generating debate because of the differences in the various entries that the two platforms have in common. In the president's biography Donald Trump, for example, Grokipedia omits references to financial controversies or the so-called "Trump Coin," while Wikipediaincludes a full section on these issues in its conflicts of interest section.

Similarly, the entry on Musk himself on Grokipedia removes any mention of a gesture at a January rally that was interpreted by some progressives as a Nazi salute. This topic does appear on Wikipedia.

The focus of the Grokipedia project, according to Musk and his collaborators, is to bring objectivity back to online knowledge and create an alternative free of ideological bias.

Meanwhile, from the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that manages Wikipedia,reacted without directly confronting Musk, but defending the value of human work in their organization.

"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," the institution said in a statement.