Elon Musk already runs more than six unicorn companies, but he still keeps coming up with new business ideas.
Elon Musk has said that xAI, his AI venture, is building Grokipedia. Grokipedia will be an unbiased alternative to Wikipedia, which has long been accused to having a left-leaning bias. Musk will likely use xAI’s Grok models to create a knowledge corpus similar to Wikipedia’s.
“We are building Grokipedia at xAI,” Musk posted on X. “Will be a massive improvement over Wikipedia. Frankly, it is a necessary step towards the xAI goal of understanding the Universe,” he added.
Musk was reacting to a post by David Sacks, who is the US crypto and AI czar in the Trump administration. “Wikipedia is hopelessly biased,” Sacks had said. “An army of left-wing activists maintain the bios and fight reasonable corrections. Magnifying the problem, Wikipedia often appears first in Google search results, and now it’s a trusted source for AI model training. This is a huge problem,” he had added.
Sacks in turn was reacting to an interview of Wikipedia’s co-founder Larry Sanger. Larry Sanger has long been talking about how Wikipedia has been taken over by left-leaning activist editors who create biased articles that are impossible to fix. Wikipedia had started out as an encyclopedia that anyone could edit, but a handful of these leftist editors have control over what goes up on Wikipedia, and they overturn the edits made by everyday users. This leads to articles having a clear left-leaning bias, which has been criticized by many people over the years.
Larry Sanger, Wikipedia’s co-founder, has now turned into one of its biggest critics. Sanger has said that the site has a become ‘propaganda’ for the left-leaning establishment. “If only one version (left-leaning) of the facts is allowed then that gives a huge incentive to wealthy and powerful people to seize control of things like Wikipedia in order to shore up their power,” he has said. Sanger is no longer with Wikipedia, and it is now controlled by its other co-founder, Jimmy Wales.
Elon Musk has been training his guns on Wikipedia for a while. In 2020, he’d tweeted that history was written by the victors, except on Wikipedia, implying that the people editing Wikipedia were losers. In 2022, he tweeted that Wikipedia had a “non trivial” left wing bias. In 2023, Musk had said that he’d give Wikipedia a billion dollars it changed its name to ‘Dickipedia’ over its left-leaning bias. Musk has also questioned the constant donations that Wikipedia keeps asking its users. Musk also wondered why Wikipedia was always asking users for donations. “Have you ever wondered why the Wikimedia Foundation wants so much money? It certainly isn’t needed to operate Wikipedia. You can literally fit a copy of the entire text on your phone! So, what’s the money for? Inquiring minds want to know,” he had posted.
Musk now seems to have taken matters into his own hands, and is starting a Wikipedia competitor named Grokipedia. It could be a good use-case for an AI model to create its own encyclopedia — Grok is trained on the entire internet, and could likely create Wikipedia-like articles instantly on any topic. But ironically, Wikipedia’s ubiquity might be its biggest hurdle — Grok is likely trained on Wikipedia as well, and has internalized many of its left-leaning biases. And if xAI can create an unbiased encyclopedia in Grokipedia that doesn’t have Wikipedia’s blatant editorial slant, it might end up being a massive service to all of humanity.