The online baptism was scheduled for yesterday, Monday 27 October, and in fact the timing was announced by Elon Musk were respected: nevertheless, a few minutes after its launch, Grokipedia was the victim of a crash.
The online encyclopedia, created with the aim of creating a credible competitor for the first time Wikipediacurrently hosts approximately 885 thousand articles, a staggering figure if we think that it is a debut, but obviously still far from its rival born in 2001, which in English today stands at 7 million.
Tesla’s owner has always defined his creation as a tool“alternative and independent” aimed at“clean up propaganda information” which instead infests Wikipedia, labeled on more than one occasion as “woke” and criticized for having taken inspiration from biased sources such as the New York Times and National Public Radio on more than one occasion. On the same site as Grokipedia it is explicitly said that“It’s more than a wiki: it’s a movement to democratize the truth.”
From the very name of Musk’s new creation you can guess its nature, since it is formed by the union between “Wikipedia” and “Grok“, i.e. the xAI chatbot trained on real-time data, which should be responsible for generating and verifying the contents. Furthermore, unlike Wikipedia, users are not authorized to modify the pages and the content of the articles, but at most they can report any errors, then entrusting the artificial intelligence with the task of intervening on them.
Once you reach the Grokipedia home page, its minimal appearance is immediately clear, since below the logo and version (currently 0.1) there is a search field through which to explore the contents that may interest the user in question.
The baptism of the new frontier of online encyclopedias did not go as expected, since a crash within a few hours of the debut, which took place in the early afternoon of yesterday, Monday 27 October. A problem, however, resolved quite quickly by the site managers, who made it reachable again already in the evening.
The battle is now open, and with the expansion of the number of articles available on Grokipedia it will be possible to evaluate more precisely the impact that Elon Musk’s creature will be able to have on a global level.