Elon Musk says his company xAI is planning an alternative to Wikipedia. He first mentioned the so-called “Grokipedia” after Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger, who has been critical of the platform he helped to build, joined former Fox News host and conservative commentator Tucker Carlson on his podcast.
“We are building Grokipedia @xAI,” Musk posted Tuesday on social media platform X. “Will be a massive improvement over Wikipedia. Frankly, it is a necessary step towards the xAI goal of understanding the Universe.”
Carlson posted his podcast episode with Sanger to X on Monday. During the over 90-minute conversation, Sanger inflamed the far right by sharing sources that Wikipedia has flagged for attribution, as well as sources that have been “fully greenlit.”
“The blacklisted sources are Breitbart, Daily Caller, Epoch Times, Fox News, New York Post, The Federalist, so you can’t use those as sources on Wikipedia,” Sanger told Carlson.
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The problem with this, as The Daily Beast noted, is that only Breitbart is officially blacklisted, whereas the others are considered either “generally unreliable” or “deprecated,” meaning they can be used for some citation purposes such as uncontroversial self-descriptions. Furthermore, Wikipedia considers Fox News’ reporting on politics and science to be “generally unreliable,” but categorizes its other reporting as “no consensus,” meaning it is marginally reliable. It’s also worth noting that Wikipedia also considers some left-leaning media companies such as the aforementioned Daily Beast and HuffPost Politics as only marginally reliable.
Even so, the episode set off a wave of conservative backlash on X. Musk’s PayPal mafia colleague and current Trump administration AI and crypto czar David Sacks called Wikipedia “hopelessly biased.” Social Capital founder and CEO Chamath Palihapitiya also chimed in on X, describing Wikipedia as a “massive psy-op.”
For his part, Musk has been critical of Wikipedia for years, accusing it of bias, questioning its leadership, and calling for its defunding. The defund post on X followed shortly after another in which Musk referred to Wikipedia as “an extension of legacy media propaganda,” because the website pointed out that his gestures during Trump’s inauguration had been compared to Nazi salutes.
“I think Elon is unhappy that Wikipedia is not for sale,” Wikipedia’s other co-founder Jimmy Wales posted on X at the time. “I hope his campaign to defund us results in lots of donations from people who care about the truth. If Elon wanted to help, he’d be encouraging kind and thoughtful intellectual people he agrees with to engage.”
Musk didn’t share many details about what a so-called Grokipedia might entail. But he did call on X users to “join @xAI and help build Grokipedia, an open source knowledge repository that is vastly better than Wikipedia,” adding, “This will be available to the public with no limits on use.”
After Musk announced his intentions to launch his own version of Wikipedia, powered by his controversial chatbot, Grok, Sanger expressed his own reservations about the plan.