Elon Musk, the world's richest man and owner of Tesla, SpaceX, and X, has once again captured the internet's attention. In an attempt to surpass Wikipedia, he has launched a new, AI-powered encyclopedia called Grokipedia. It will run entirely through his chatbot.
Unlike Wikipedia, Grokipedia will feature limited public editing and will focus primarily on Musk's AI fact-checking knowledge system. The tech billionaire claimed the online encyclopedia would align more closely with his own conservative political stance, contrasting with Wikipedia's established position.
Announcement and launch details
Musk apparently made the announcement on his social media platform, X, in a post detailing Grokipedia.
In a social media post, Elon Musk wrote, "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".
After Grokipedia launched on Monday afternoon, its Grokipedia.com URL briefly crashed due to being flooded with millions of entries. Approximately 800,000 AI-powered entries appeared on launch, compared to Wikipedia's around 7 million human-written entries.
Accessing Grokipedia.com revealed a dark background with a search bar similarly set against a dark tone. Its font style resembles ChatGPT. The website's landing page showed that 885,279 articles were viewed on the first day, compared to 7,081,705 on the English Wikipedia.
User feedback and speculation
However, many users commenting on Elon Musk's post have pointed out issues, stating that the encyclopedia is giving incorrect answers. Some users also claim that Grokipedia is primarily glorifying Elon Musk and showing only positive information about him.
Despite this, many speculations suggest that Grokipedia will completely change the way internet searches are conducted, driven by Elon Musk's dominance. Since AI operates on pre-existing information, accurate information cannot be guaranteed, though users will certainly get the latest updates immediately after a search.
Source of information
Wikipedia is currently the primary source of much of Grokipedia's underlying information. The content source displayed when searching Grokipedia currently indicates that the data is taken from Wikipedia.
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