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Posted by thsName 2 days ago

Grokipedia by xAI(grokipedia.com)
197 points | 145 commentspage 2
benrutter 1 day ago|
Putting aside my political concerns about Elon Musk starting an encyclopedia, I thought I'd look up the indie rock band Beat Happening as a tester. My first thoughts were that it was very impressive. There's a confused garbled image link (that appears as text) but otherwise it looks convincing:

> Beat Happening was an American indie pop band formed in Olympia, Washington, in 1982 by vocalist and guitarist Calvin Johnson, guitarist Heather Lewis, and drummer Bret Lunsford.

Then I though, hey let's see what wikipedia says, here it is:

> Beat Happening was an American indie pop band formed in Olympia, Washington in 1982. Calvin Johnson, Heather Lewis, and Bret Lunsford were the band's continual members.

I came away less impressed- grokipedia's opening paragraph reads to me like a very minor rephrase. I assume wikipedia is in the training data here and being spat back out?

In fact going back to the garbled image link:

> ![Beat Happening in 1988. Clockwise from top: Calvin Johnson, Bret Lunsford, Heather Lewis.](./assets/Beat_Happening_(1988_Rough_Trade_publicity_photo)

Even this seems to be a reference to the wilipedia image at the top of the article titled:

> File:Beat Happening (1988 Rough Trade publicity photo).jpg

What a collosal waste of resources? Is anyone under the impression that this kind of "rephrased and lesss acurate wikipedia" is going to be helpful?

Maken 23 hours ago|
The point is rewriting the articles that matter to Musk. Nobody cares about the rest of the articles, they are there just to justify Grokipedia being an encyclopedia at all.
dabinat 2 days ago||
I guess this poses an interesting question: if Wikipedia was being created today, would it be a human- edited encyclopedia or would they just resort to AI because it’s easier? It makes me wonder if people will shy away from hard problems and just take the easy path, resulting in a shallower and less useful product to society.
archagon 2 days ago||
Without Wikipedia's corpus, today's AI might not even be possible.
hagbard_c 1 day ago||
Oh yes it would be possible. It would probably be less biased as well. Don't forget that these models are trained on libraries of congress worth of books as well as things like Wikipedia. Given that Wikipedia - like any encyclopedia - does not (or should not, at least) contain original research but only refers to existing sources and given that the companies which train these models have their ways to access those sources - sometimes illegally but still - all Wikipedia adds to the mix is a biased interpretation of the original research.
Gigachad 1 day ago||
I have to wonder, obviously the grok version exists just to push Elons politics and take control over the “truth”. But it seems like an LLM could take over. Considering Wikipedia is not meant to contain any original facts, just a collection of references to external information.
CSMastermind 2 days ago||
Seems kind of spase still? I tried looking up Little house on the parire and it turned up the TV show but not the book series.

Reflections on Trusting Trust is mentioned in Ken Thompson's page but when I searched for it he wasn't part of the results.

measurablefunc 2 days ago|
It's yet another scam/beta product. He's testing the waters to see if it can be turned into a commercial project.
verdverm 2 days ago||
I'm not sure it isn't primarily to further the post-truth world where popularity trumps facts

Same story for Twitter

If he gets a $1T pay package, cost centers for the larger goal are rounding errors

abhishekbasu 2 days ago||
Grokipedia at home: https://github.com/abhishekbasu/localwiki
srid 2 days ago||
See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45424533

Does anyone know why replies are disabled in that other submission?

qustrolabe 1 day ago||
this concept has huge potential when done slowly with caution, but I bet this one ends up too politically biased one day, so far seems like the most blatant copy paste of wikipedia texts
thiht 2 days ago||
Thanks for sharing, added to my blocklist!
hagbard_c 1 day ago|
May I ask why you directly added it to your blocklist? I can see several potential reasons people block sites and I wonder which is the leading one for you.
ggm 12 hours ago|||
You can't chose an identity based off the illuminati trilogy and expect people to enter a politically neutral discussion with you surely?

The entry premise for wikipedia is that "it's a discussion" is a valid meta state for an article. Do you think that entry state is a valid condition for a machine generated encyclopedia where its guiding principle is "to adjust for systematic left bias in the world view" ? (my words)

clearly, one engages with the world as it aligns to ones world view. To be continually at odds with reality as you perceive it is both tiring and ultimately unsatisfying. Grok users seek a truth grounded in confidence grok is right, and it's founder is right, and the people who seek truth elsewhere are wrong and ungrokly and stupid and dull.

Fnord!

thiht 1 day ago|||
I don’t need to access the far right echo chamber of a fucking nazi billionaire. MAGA are liars and they believe truth is "left-biased". To them "unbiased" means "fits how I want the world to be". There’s absolutely no objectivity to expect from Grok, Grokipedia, Twitter. It’s the same shit as Conservapedia.

That they attack Wikipedia because it’s somehow fake is proof enough that Grokipedia is gonna become a fascist cesspool.

hagbard_c 21 hours ago|||
You're clearly the target market for Wikipedia and as such have nothing to gain from any attempts to open your mind for a different view.

Just... go easy on all those labels you spew out so easily. It makes it hard to take anything you say seriously, as it stands now those labels seem more like a mirror.

thiht 20 hours ago||
None of these labels are false. I won’t shy away from calling a spade a spade, or a nazi a nazi. I’m tired of far right extremists trying to control the narrative while saying the most hateful shit and lying all the time. If you want to attack someone’s speech, attack MAGA. They’re the party of flat earth and antivax and "paracetamol causes autism" and "slavery was not that bad".

And stop trying to frame this as just open mindedness, this is not the case. MAGA and far right billionaires are not the open minded ones.

hagbard_c 20 hours ago||
You calling these individuals 'nazis' devalues the term and ridicules those who fought and died to defeat the Nazis. It devalues the threat the Nazis were to those around them.

You using terms like 'nazi' and 'far right extremist' so easily to indicate those who you happen to dislike tells me you need to either grow up or need to touch grass, for real. Drop that applePhone and go outside, meet some people. Meet some of those you would call nazis and right wing extremists as well just like they meet people like you all the time.

Grow up.

techblueberry 2 days ago||
What is the point of Grokipedia. It's an interesting experiment I guess (Really is it just a bunch of pre-rendered prompts I could ask Grok instead?), curious how much of wikipedia is in the training set. I would think if you wanted an alternate encyclopedia you would want something that AI can train against, so Grok itself can't probably bet too much value out of it. (

I guess people can choose their truth now? I suppose the US Government could require grokipedia to be chosen over wikipedia for use in schools?

I mean I guess I'll check it out for the lols but I don't see myself actually using it.

tim333 1 day ago||
>... Musk announced xAI was building a new AI-generated online encyclopedia, to be called Grokipedia, in the midst of his criticisms of Wikipedia's ideological biases. The project was suggested and named by White House AI and crypto czar David O. Sacks at the All-In podcast conference earlier that month. According to Musk's announcement, it would be an AI-powered knowledge base designed to rival Wikipedia by addressing its perceived biases, errors, and ideological slants.

(source Wikipedia)

techblueberry 1 day ago|||
This doesn’t really answer my question.
hagbard_c 1 day ago|||
Let the battle... commence.

Wikipedia is a collaborative, multilingual online encyclopedia consisting of freely editable articles written and maintained primarily by volunteers worldwide, utilizing wiki software to enable open contributions under free content licenses. Launched on January 15, 2001, by American entrepreneur Jimmy Wales and philosopher Larry Sanger as a wiki-based complement to the slower-paced expert-reviewed Nupedia project, it rapidly expanded due to its accessible editing model.[1][2] Since 2003, Wikipedia has been hosted and supported by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization that provides technical infrastructure and promotes free knowledge dissemination.[3] As of October 2025, Wikipedia encompasses over 65 million articles across 357 language editions, making it one of the largest reference works ever compiled, with the English edition alone surpassing 7 million entries.[4] Renowned for its unprecedented scale, accessibility, and role in democratizing information, Wikipedia has nonetheless encountered persistent criticisms regarding factual reliability, susceptibility to vandalism and hoaxes, and systemic ideological biases—particularly a left-leaning slant in coverage of political figures and topics, as evidenced by computational analyses associating right-of-center entities with more negative sentiment and acknowledged by co-founder Sanger who has described the platform as captured by ideologically driven editors.

(source Grokipedia)

https://grokipedia.com/page/Wikipedia

tim333 1 day ago||
I compared the articles on HN and the Grok one was much longer but waffled on quite a lot like that paragraph.

Overall I think I'd read the Wikipedia one on the whole.

newer_vienna 2 days ago||
https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/08/uberfact-ul... would be an answer form an old school blogger
techblueberry 2 days ago|||
I think everyone wants pluralism unless they're in charge, in which case they want a world where only the people who agree with them have power.

I also note that - in theory, the purpose of wikipedia is to serve it's users. If I want to know, the example outlined in the blog post, where was George W. Bush born, I can find the answer in Wikipedia. Certainly there are places where it optimizes for it's editors but for the most part, the vastness of a website with 7 million articles implies it is for the consumers.

Uberpedia seems much more intended for the editors. I don't want to consume information, I just want to feel warm and fuzzy knowing that there are people who agree with me.

But Grokipedia doesn't sound like Curtis is describing at all, he explicitly calls out that forks (like conservipedia) don't solve these "issues".

dingnuts 2 days ago|||
[flagged]
IAmGraydon 1 day ago||
It’s sad to see that there’s an army of engineers willing to help a literal insane person attempt to warp reality with a massive propaganda machine for a salary.
josefritzishere 1 day ago|
Does the world need a Mecha-Hitler version of Wikipedia?
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