Elon Musk, CEO of xAI, sees the online encyclopedia Grokipedia as a modern-day version of the Library of Alexandria, which should be preserved and widely distributed.

In a conversation with Ron Baron, founder of fund management company Baron Capital, in the middle of this month, Elon Musk shared his vision for Grokipedia by xAI. He said Grokipedia aims to become an open-source repository of all knowledge that anyone can access and use.

“Grokipedia is like the modern-day Library of Alexandria. The burning down of the Library of Alexandria was a huge tragedy. So, to preserve knowledge, I think we should carve it in stone in tiny type and distribute it widely,” Musk said.

Grokipedia’s home page interface. Photo: Grokipedia

The Library of Alexandria was one of the most famous and important libraries in the ancient world, built in Egypt around the 3rd century BC. The building burned down in 48 BC during the Roman civil war between Julius Caesar and Pompey, and the knowledge stored inside was lost.

Musk sees Grokipedia as a way to prevent the loss of knowledge. In the worst case, he explains, future civilizations will still see what humans have learned from the encyclopedia and learn from it. “We want to make copies and distribute them all over the Earth, even to the Moon, Mars, and deep space,” he says.

The new plan may sound far-fetched, but Musk has a history of strange space missions. In 2018, SpaceX, the aerospace company he founded, launched a red Tesla Roadster into space. The vehicle made its first close flyby of Mars in 2020 and is still wandering around.

If Musk’s plan comes to fruition, his online encyclopedia will likely no longer be called Grokipedia. He plans to rename it Encyclopedia Galactica, in honor of the science fiction writers Isaac Asimov and Douglas Adams, whose books will also be placed in the Tesla Roadster that will be launched into space.

Billionaire Elon Musk at an event in Lancaster, Pennsylvania on October 26, 2024. Photo: AFP

Despite its mission to preserve knowledge, Grokipedia is not entirely safe from destruction. The site was down yesterday due to a Cloudflare outage and is now back up and running.

The first version of Grokipedia was launched on October 27. However, users quickly reported a number of problems such as interrupted access, no illustrations, inaccurate information and a lot of content taken from competitor Wikipedia. According to the information at the bottom of the homepage, Grokipedia currently has 885,279 articles, which is not an increase compared to the launch date.