Elon Musk appears to have launched Grokipedia, an alternative to Wikipedia, on Monday
Published by RawNews1st
The tech CEO and billionaire recently shared a post on X announcing his intention to build Grokipedia and compete against Wikipedia.
The announcement came in response to a post from David Sacks, a well-known tech investor and President Donald Trump’s AI and crypto czar, who called out Wikipedia for being “hopelessly biased” and led by an “army of left-wing activists.”
Joseph Reagle, a Northeastern professor of communications studies and a Wikipedia expert and historian, says it’s still too early to gauge the seriousness of Musk’s post announcing his intention to build the service.
But any challenger trying to take on Wikipedia likely will face a major uphill battle, says Reagle.
“It would be very challenging for an alternative website to overtake Wikipedia,” says Reagle, who has published research and written books on the organization. “The website has been around for a while and therefore enjoys significant network effects among contributors (who want to dedicate themselves to one website and system) and momentum among end users (people and services).”
Sacks himself was responding to an interview that right-wing podcaster and personality Tucker Carlson had with Larry Sanger, a Wikipedia co-founder who has made comments about what he calls the organization’s left-wing bias.
Grok is a large language model similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini. It was developed by Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI.
The chatbot was launched in November 2023 and can be accessed via an app or through Elon Musk’s social media service, X.
