AI vs Humans: Musk's Grokipedia challenges Wikipedia's volunteer model

Challenging directly to the established world of online knowledge, Elon Musk’s company xAI launched Grokipedia on Monday, October 27.

Grokipedia is an AI-generated encyclopedia that developed its brand-identity as a truth-seeking alternative to what Musk alleges as the “left-biased” and “activist-controlled” wikipedia.

As mentioned on the original site, “version 0.1” went live with over 885,000 articles which is just a fraction of Wikipedia’s more than seven million English entries.

However, Musk builds its hype by citing on X (formerly known as Twitter) that “even at 0.1 it’s better than Wikipedia” and promising that “Version 1.0 will be 10X better.”

The launch builds on the years of criticism from Musk directed at Wikipedia. Musk repeatedly alleged that the non-profit free online encyclopedia is actually managed by “far-left activists” and has an “extremely left-biased” editorial content.

The SpaceX CEO previously urged his followers to defund it.

“The goal of Grok and Grokipedia is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. We will never be perfect, but we shall nonetheless strive towards that goal,” he added.

This declaration highlights a significant clash in how knowledge is curated.

Wikipedia, founded in 2001, is supported by a global community of human volunteers who write and edit articles following strict “neutral point of view” policy. The source of Wikipedia’s funding is majorly donations.

On the other hand, Grokipedia is entirely curated and “fact-checked” by xAI’s assistant, Grok. The approach is already under criticism as AI-based models are previously known to “hallucinate” or invent facts,

As of now, the site doesn’t enable human editing unlike Wikipedia. But Musk cited that ultimately Grokipedia will allow people to modify articles with the AI having the final say.