Elon Musk wants to develop an alternative online encyclopedia that’ll go by the name “Grokipedia.” It’ll be made with his AI company xAI, according to the announcement via social media post. The name is derived from Musk’s AI chatbot Grok, which—according to Musk—is designed to search for the “truth.”
Musk has been an outspoken critic of Wikipedia, having accused the platform (whose content is created by users) of not being objective and having a left-wing political bias.
Shortly before the announcement, his companion David Sacks (AI advisor under President Donald Trump) also spoke out against Wikipedia as being “hopelessly biased” and criticized how its material was being used to train artificial intelligence.
The AI chatbot Grok has also made controversial headlines in the past, such as for making anti-Semitic statements. Musk and his team attributed this to faulty programming, but analyses show that behind-the-scenes corrections can strongly influence the AI’s responses.
At a glance, here’s what you should know about Grokipedia:
- Grokipedia is currently still in development phase at xAI.
- Grokipedia is intended to be thematically based on Wikipedia, while also being AI-supported and, according to Musk, “more objective.”
- The controversies surrounding Grok so far raise questions about how reliable and unbiased Grokipedia’s content will actually be.
As of right now, it’s still unclear whether Grokipedia will be accessible to the public, and if so, when it will be released.
Musk sued Apple and OpenAI because Grok wasn’t topping the charts
Back in August, Musk sued Apple and OpenAI and accused the companies of conspiring to put his AI products—in particular Grok—at a competitive disadvantage. The lawsuit alleged that Apple downgraded other AI apps in the App Store and delayed the app review process.
The background to this is that OpenAI’s ChatGPT currently sits at the top of the iOS App Store rankings while Grok lingers in 22nd place and X in 28th place. Musk sees this as a distortion of competition due to the ChatGPT’s integration in iOS, although Apple had announced that it would also support other AI models in the future.
This article originally appeared on our sister publication PC-WELT and was translated and localized from German.