Elon Musk's Anti Woke Encyclopedia

I'm not entirely sure what's been going on, but if you've been following the story of Elon Musk's push to get a trillion dollar payday out of Tesla, it seems entirely possible to me that Musk has just been coming up with side projects like his new online encyclopedia, Groipedia, so that he could convince Tesla shareholders to pay him a huge sum of money. Otherwise, he'll abandon them in pursuit of these other interests. And it's believable, too. A few years ago, he bought Twitter so that he could become a chat for moderator.

Yesterday, Tesla's shareholders caved in and approved a pay package that would make Musk the world's first trillionaire and grant him control of a quarter of the company's shares if he hits a series of ambitious targets. So maybe this whole Groipedia thing is already over. If you haven't heard about it, the gro in groipedia refers to Elon Musk's generative AI chatbot, which is featured prominently on his social network or everything app Twitter, which he calls X. With Groipedia, Musk's stated goal is to create an open-source comprehensive collection of all knowledge, then place copies of that etched in a stable oxide, whatever that means, in orbit around the moon and Mars to preserve it for the future.

Now, I checked with Grock as to what he means by a stable oxide, and Grock said that he probably means glass. Anyhow, Musk says that Groipedia will be a compendium of the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. A rather lofty promise from someone who not so long ago offered Wikipedia a billion dollars to rename itself Dickipedia. Elon Musk has framed the project as a purge of propaganda, a replacement for what he calls legacy media, and a step towards building a more open-source repository of knowledge.

But given Groipedia's reliance on his chatbot Grock, the result may be less encyclopedia Britannica and more Reddit meets Twitter trolls as his chatbot does train on sources like that. According to XAI, Grock will be responsible for all factchecking on Groipedia, which is a bit like asking a parrot to verify a Shakespeare quote. It might sound convincing, but you wouldn't want to bet your reputation on its accuracy. Wikipedia, in Musk's view, has gone soft.

He used to like it, but now it's too woke, too establishment, and too unwilling to ...