Short answer: Sam Nadler says Elon Musk launched Grokipedia as an AI-powered rival to Wikipedia. Jordan Metzner says Grok needs its own source of record, and Grokipedia will need strong SEO to rank on Google.
Watch this answer from Episode 19 (starts at 18:07) · Episode 19 notes and transcript
From Episode 19: Mirror, Mirror on the Wall… Who Built the Smartest AI of All?, starting at 18:07.
Sam Nadler [18:07]: Cool. So next story is, Elon launched Grokipedia, which is an AI powered rival to Wikipedia. And, yeah, I think, the immediate reaction has been that it's it has some biases. But, yeah, I think what do you think about Grokipedia?
Jordan Metzner [18:30]: Well, Wikipedia is just like has been the standard of, kind of information online since, like, the encyclopedia moved to digital format. And so kinda most people use, like, Google plus, like, Wikipedia as kind of source of record. I think, as we now have LLMs, those become a new source of record. You don't really need Wikipedia when you ask ChatGPT or, kind of any of these chat tools, some factual information because they're able to source that. And I think that's probably one of the reasons why they launched it is that, in order for Grok to be successful, they need the equivalent of Grokipedia, and so why not just, put a free website up for it? I do know that Elon said he's done it so it can be as an alternative to woke Wikipedia, he said. And I know he's made fun of, like, the guy who makes the most amount of edits on Wikipedia, etcetera. But it does make sense that, like, over time as AI gets better and better that, the encyclopedia is written more and more by, AI that can write it fast, quickly, real time. And do we even need a website of record when we have these chatbots that can generate any piece of content at any time? So I do think it's interesting.
Jordan Metzner [19:45]: I think he's kinda like poking the bear. It is very hard to rank for a lot of these terms on the top of Google, and so I think, like, in order for Grokipedia to be successful, it's gonna have to have a really good SEO. And, we'll see how much money and time he continues to invest in it, or is it just like another website that, he launched as a fun joke, maybe just the backbone of, what Grok needs to do as far as kind of, maintaining a source of data and information.
