For Elon Musk, Grokipedia isn’t just a Wikipedia dupe. It’s a knowledge repository — and one that will make it to Mars.
Musk has high visions for his online encyclopedia, which he launched in October. In a recent conversation with Baron Capital founder Ron Baron, Musk said that Grokipedia will maintain the status of human information.
Grokipedia is like a “modern-day Library of Alexandria,” the Tesla CEO said.
“It was the great tragedy that the Library of Alexandria burned down,” Musk said. “In order to preserve this knowledge, I think we want to literally etch it in stone, in sort of stone microfont, and distribute it widely.”
One of the world’s largest libraries, the Library of Alexandria, burned to the ground in 48 BC during the Roman Civil War between Julius Caesar and Pompey. The knowledge within the library was lost.
Musk sees Grokipedia as a way to protect against this knowledge loss. In the worst case, Musk said, future civilization will “see what we learned” from the encyclopedia and “pick things up from there” — an idea reminiscent of the premise of one of Musk’s favorite sci-fi series, “Foundation,” by Isaac Asimov.
Grokipedia doesn’t seem entirely immune to destruction just yet. This morning, the site was down due to a Cloudflare outage. It is now back online.
It’s also unclear whether Grokipedia is expanding to incorporate new knowledge. The site currently says that it comprises 885,279 articles — the same number it listed at the time of its launch last month.
Musk’s encyclopedia won’t stay earthbound, he said. The copies will be sent to “the Moon and Mars and out to deep space.”
While the plan has all the makings of a moonshot idea, there is some precedent here. In 2018, SpaceX launched a red Tesla Roadster into space. A spacesuit-wearing “Starman” dummy was perched in the driver’s seat. In 2020, the vehicle made its first flyby of Mars.
If Musk’s plan does eventually come to fruition, don’t expect his encyclopedia to still be named Grokipedia. Musk said that he plans to rename it to Encyclopedia Galactica in the future, in honor of science fiction writers Isaac Asimov and Douglas Adams.
Asimov and Douglas’s books were also stored in the Roadster, which was shot into space.
In an X post, Musk wrote that Grokipedia will be renamed when it is “good enough (long way to go).”
“The idea of Encyclopedia Galactica is to create an open-source repository of all knowledge,” Musk told Baron. “Open-source meaning anyone can access it, anyone can use it. If other people want to train on it, they can do so.”
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