Musk Announces Development of “Grokipedia”

On Tuesday, Elon Musk revealed that his AI company, Xai, is working on a project called “Grokipedia.”

As the founder of Tesla, Musk expressed that this new encyclopedia—named after Xai’s chatbot, Grok—aims to surpass Wikipedia. He commented that it will be “a bigger improvement over Wikipedia.”

Musk encouraged participation in the initiative through a post on X, stating, “Join @xai and help build Grokipedia, an open source knowledge repository that is much better than Wikipedia! This is open to the public without any restrictions on use.”

There was no immediate response from Wikipedia regarding Musk’s announcement.

It’s not the first time Musk has criticized Wikipedia, often referring to it as “Wokipedia.” In 2023, he even suggested purchasing the platform for $1 billion, humorously stating it could be renamed “Dickipedia.”

Last year, Musk disparaged the site after they created a page titled “Donald Trump and Fascism,” which discussed if Trump could be labeled as a fascist. He deemed the site “broken” due to this content.

This week also saw additional criticism of Wikipedia when its co-founder, Larry Sanger, who has frequently labeled Wikipedia as “propaganda,” appeared on a podcast hosted by Tucker Carlson. Sanger raised new concerns about what he termed Digital Ensachtyre.

Sanger, who left Wikipedia shortly after its launch in 2002, criticized the platform for allegedly censoring conservative and libertarian viewpoints.

He remarked that hundreds of individuals manage the site, seemingly stifling ideological disagreements. However, he mentioned uncertainty about whether a controlling figure was influencing the editing process.

He referenced Virgil Griffiths, a former Ethereum programmer who faced imprisonment for aiding North Korea in evading sanctions. Griffiths created a tool that identified when CIA computers were used to edit Wikipedia pages in the early 2000s.

“They were able to find a lot of edits coming from Langley,” Sanger noted.