Elon Musk launches Grokipedia to compete with online encyclopedia Wikipedia

ENT

Elon Musk launches Grokipedia to compete with online encyclopedia Wikipedia

2025-10-29 08:53 Last Updated At：09:00

Elon Musk has launched Grokipedia, a crowdsourced online encyclopedia that the billionaire seeks to position as a rival to Wikipedia.

Writing on social media, Musk said that Grokipedia.com is “now live” and its goal is the “truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”

Musk has previously criticized Wikipedia for being filled with “propaganda” and called for people to stop donating to the site, which is run by a nonprofit. In September he announced that his artificial intelligence company xAI was working on Grokipedia.

The Grokipedia site has a minimalist appearance with little beyond a search bar where users can type in queries. It states that it has 885,279 articles. Wikipedia, meanwhile, says it has more than 7 million articles in English.

Like Wikipedia, users can search for articles on various topics such as Taylor Swift, the baseball World Series, or Buckingham Palace.

While Wikipedia is written and edited by volunteers, it's unclear how exactly Grokipedia articles are put together. Reports suggest the site is powered by the same xAI model that underpins Musk's Grok chatbot, but some articles are seemingly adapted from Wikipedia.

The San Francisco-based Wikimedia Foundation said in a statement Tuesday that it is “still in the process of understanding how Grokipedia works.”

As a huge trove of well-constructed sentences with little restriction on how it's used, Wikipedia has been a key source used to train AI chatbots, including Grok's rivals ChatGPT and Google's Gemini.

“This human-created knowledge is what AI companies rely on to generate content; even Grokipedia needs Wikipedia to exist,” said the Wikimedia Foundation.

Wikipedia for months has been a target of the political right. Republican lawmakers in the U.S. Congress launched an investigation in August of alleged “manipulation efforts” in Wikipedia's editing process that they said could inject bias and undermine neutral points of view on its platform and the AI systems that rely on it.

Wikipedia encourages its volunteer editors to cite nearly every sentence or paragraph with a primary source, and sentences not verified can be challenged and removed. Some of Grokipedia's entries are thinly sourced, such as an entry on the Chola Dynasty of southern India that has three linked sources, compared to Wikipedia's that has 113 linked sources plus dozens of referenced books.

Grokipedia's entry on Wikipedia accuses the site of having “systemic ideological biases — particularly a left-leaning slant in coverage of political figures and topics.”

The Wikimedia Foundation said in its statement Tuesday: “Unlike newer projects, Wikipedia’s strengths are clear: it has transparent policies, rigorous volunteer oversight, and a strong culture of continuous improvement. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, written to inform billions of readers without promoting a particular point of view.”

Hundreds more in Venezuela say their loved ones are political prisoners

GUANARE, Venezuela (AP) — Freedom came too late for Edilson Torres.

The police officer was buried Tuesday in his humble, rural hometown following his death in a Venezuelan prison, where he was held incommunicado since being detained in December on what his family said were politically motivated accusations.

Torres, 51, died of a heart attack Saturday, just as his family awaited the government's promised release of prisoners following the U.S. capture of then-President Nicolás Maduro. The loss left his family reeling.

Now scores of families — who once hesitated to approach advocacy groups — are coming forward to register their loved ones as “political prisoners" in the hope that they might have a more optimistic future than Torres.

Foro Penal, which tracks and advocates for Venezuelan prisoners, has received a “flood of messages” from families since last week, said Alfredo Romero, director of the nongovernmental organization.

“They didn’t report it out of fear, and now they’re doing it because, in a way, they feel that there is this possibility that their families will be freed,” Romero said. “They see it as hope, but more importantly, as an opportunity.”

The head of Venezuela’s national assembly, Jorge Rodríguez, said last week that a “significant number” of Venezuelan and foreigners imprisoned in the country would be released as a gesture to “seek peace” following the operation that captured Maduro in the early hours of Jan. 3. The U.S. and Venezuela's opposition have long demanded the widespread release of detained opposition figures, activists and journalists, whom they claim are used as a political tool by the ruling party.

Venezuela’s government denies that there are prisoners unjustly detained, accusing them of plotting to destabilize Maduro’s government.

Following Torres' death, Venezuela's Attorney General Tarek William Saab said in a statement that the case had been assigned to a terrorism unit and “was linked to criminal activities detected by state security agencies.” He did not offer any details, but the vague language tracks with past accusations leveled against real or perceived government critics.

Romero said that of the roughly 300 families who reached out to Foro Penal, about 100 cases so far have been confirmed as politically motivated. Most of those reported over the past few days, he said, once worked for Venezuela's military. That is on top of more than 800 people that the organization says continue to be detained for political reasons in Venezuela.

As of Tuesday evening, Foro Penal had confirmed 56 prisoners it said were detained for political reasons had been freed. The group criticized the lack of government transparency over the releases. Venezuela’s government negated the organization's count, and reported a far higher figure of 400 Tuesday afternoon.

But the government did not provide evidence of the releases, a time range in which they were carried out nor identify those freed, making it impossible to determine whether those freed were behind bars for political or other reasons.

Before Torres' funeral on Tuesday, a procession of cars and motorcycles stopped at a local jail, where his wife remains detained on disputed accusations.

“My little brother, my little brother,” Emelyn Torres said between sobs after his casket, cloaked in Venezuela's flag, arrived at her home for the wake. A few feet away, their grandmother nearly fainted as dozens of people crammed into the living room to pay their respects.

Hours earlier, as a minivan transported the body of her brother 267 miles (430 kilometers) from the capital, Caracas, to Guanare, Torres learned that other men linked to the WhatsApp group that led to her brother's arrest had just been released from prison. She wailed.

Among those who have been released are: human rights attorney Rocío San Miguel, who immediately relocated to Spain; Biagio Pilieri, an opposition leader who was part of Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado’s 2024 presidential campaign; and Enrique Márquez, a former electoral authority and presidential candidate.

Italian businessman Marco Burlò, who was released from prison Monday, told reporters outside a Rome airport Tuesday that he was kept isolated throughout his detention, which he characterized as a “pure and real kidnapping.”

“I can’t say that I was physically abused, but without being able to talk to our children, without the right to defense, without being able to speak to the lawyer, completely isolated, here they thought that I might have died,” he said.

The small set of releases over the past few days continues to fuel criticisms by families, human rights watchdogs at the United Nations and U.S. politicians, who have accused the government of not following through on their word of a wider release.

But the rapid political shifts in the Latin American nation and the distant possibility of release simultaneously marked a rare moment of hope for many families who have spent years wondering if their loved ones would ever be freed.

Part of the reason that Romero said he believed so many people had not come forward is the government's ongoing crackdown on dissent since Venezuela's tumultuous 2024 election, which Maduro claimed to have won despite ample credible evidence to the contrary.

As mass street protests broke out, authorities said they detained more than 2,000 people. In the month after July elections, Venezuela's government passed a law — dubbed the “anti-NGO law” by critics — making it easier for the government to criminalize human rights groups.

That had a chilling effect, Romero said, making families hesitant to come forward — until now.

Janetsky reported from Mexico City.

Follow AP’s coverage of Latin America and the Caribbean at https://apnews.com/hub/latin-america