Holiday Ayo - Elon Musk's technology company, xAI, recently launched an online encyclopedia similar to Wikipedia, Grokipedia.

Unfortunately, despite promising differences, it was discovered that some of its content was copied from Wikipedia.

The site, which was touted as a Wikipedia competitor, actually relies on the same source, complete with a Wikimedia licensing notice at the bottom of its pages.

Grokipedia has just launched in its initial version (v0.1). Visually, the site is nearly identical to Wikipedia the front page contains only a large search bar, and each entry has the same format: title, subheading, and a list of references.

However, users cannot edit articles. An "edit" button is present on some pages, but it does not allow visitors to submit new changes, as reported by The Verge, Tuesday (October 28).

The problem arose when some users discovered that Grokipedia articles about the MacBook Air, PlayStation 5, and Lincoln Mark VIII contained content nearly identical to Wikipedia, even copying and pasting it word for word.

At the bottom of the article, Grokipedia includes the following statement: "Content adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0."

Ironically, Elon Musk previously promised that Grokipedia would be a "major improvement" on Wikipedia.

However, in reality, many pages on Grokipedia still rely entirely on data from the very site it is trying to compete with.

"Even Grokipedia needs Wikipedia to exist," quipped Lauren Dickinson, a spokesperson for the Wikimedia Foundation, to The Verge.

In addition to the alleged copying, Grokipedia has also been criticized for claiming that all articles have been fact-checked by Grok, an AI model created by xAI.

This claim raises doubts, given that large language models (LLMs) often produce factual errors.

Grokipedia currently has over 885,000 articles, far less than Wikipedia, which has around 7 million English-language pages.

However, with this controversial first step, Grokipedia demonstrates that in the AI era, building knowledge from scratch is not as easy as copying what already exists.