“Grokipedia”
Elon Musk is launching competition for Wikipedia
The online encyclopedia Wikipedia is a thorn in Elon Musk’s side. He had an alternative developed at his AI company – which partly uses Wikipedia.
Elon Musk has launched his alternative to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. The website called Grokipedia offers a similar design with a search form and articles with references. It was developed at the tech billionaire’s AI company xAI.
The development status of Grokipedia is initially referred to as “version 0.1”. Even at this stage, in his opinion, the encyclopedia was “better than Wikipedia,” Musk wrote on his online platform X. However, users noticed that some texts were based on articles on Wikipedia. The technology blog “The Verge” referred to the Grokipedia article about Apple’s Macbook Air, which states that it was “adapted” from Wikipedia.
Elon Musk rails against Wikipedia
Wikipedia articles are created and edited by users. But Musk has long claimed that the encyclopedia is not objective and has a left-wing political orientation. He himself is known for right-wing views.
The name of Musk’s encyclopedia counter-proposal is based on that of the xAI chatbot Grok. Musk had always proclaimed that Grok should be an AI software that searches for the truth. In recent months, however, Grok has caused controversy over anti-Semitic statements. Musk’s company blamed faulty programming.
AI fact check?
The articles in the Musk Encyclopedia say that they were fact-checked by Grok. It is still unclear how exactly this works – and which sources are accessed, for example. AI software is also generally known for so-called hallucinations, in which it invents plausible-sounding information.
“We are still trying to understand how Grokipedia works,” the Wikimedia Foundation, which is behind Wikipedia, said in a statement to The Verge. She pointed out that AI companies rely on human-created articles on Wikipedia, for example.
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Source: Stern
