X-owner Elon Musk has announced that his AI company, xAI, will launch the early beta for its Wikipedia competitor in two weeks, describing the service as the answer to “falsehoods” and “half-truths.”
Replying to a post about the upcoming AI-powered “Grokipedia,” Musk said via X on Sunday that “version 0.1 early beta” will be rolled out in two weeks.
Musk initially announced xAI was building Grokipedia on Sept. 30, stating on X that it “will be a massive improvement over Wikipedia,” adding that: “frankly, it is a necessary step toward the xAI goal of understanding the Universe.”
Details on the specifics are currently sparse; however, Musk has previously stated that Grokipedia will consist of an “open source knowledge repository.”
It appears that the idea for Grokipedia was brainstormed live during a summit hosted by The All-In Podcast in September. During his appearance, Musk was explaining to the panel that Grok scans a wide range of sources, such as Wikipedia posts, documents, PDFs to verify if the information is true, “partially true,” false or missing details.
He said Grok would rewrite that information to convey what it deems as the full truth. In response, co-host David Sacks suggested Musk should launch some sort of “Grokipedia” and offer it as a service, to which Musk said he would “talk to the team” about it.
Elon Musk has beef with Wikipedia
The Tesla co-founder has had a long-running stoush with Wikipedia, criticising the platform on several occasions, alleging that it hosts misinformation, has editorial practices slanted toward the left and censors certain information.
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In October 2023, Musk even went so far as to say that he would pay the platform $1 billion if it changed its name to “Dikipedia,” aiming at an alleged ideological bias amid the Wikipedia Foundation’s fundraising efforts at the time.
Recently, he referenced that joke again last week when commenting on a post from venture capitalist Chamath Plihapitiya, who claimed that “Wikipedia is a massive psyop.”
Wikipedia controversy
Given the crowd-sourced nature of information on Wikipedia, it has a long list of controversies over the years, with many of them actually documented and listed on the platform.
A recent incident that has brought debate around the platform into the spotlight again was an interview Tucker Carlson had with Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger on Sept. 30.
Sanger, who stopped being involved with the platform back in 2002, was highlighting the sources approved and blacklisted on the platform, as he went on to allege that “there is a serious academic encyclopedia of Christianity that is not allowed on Wikipedia,” among other things.
“There is a whole army of administrators – hundreds of them — who are constantly blocking people that they have ideological disagreements with,” he said.
According to Musk, xAI won’t just stop there, with plans to jump into gaming also in the works. In another retweet on X on Sunday, Musk said the “xAI game studio will release a great AI-generated game before the end of next year.”
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