Elon Musk wants to create a 'modern-day Library of Alexandria' — and send copies to deep space (www.businessinsider.com)

Elon Musk announced plans to turn Grokipedia — the online encyclopedia he launched in October — into a long-lived, open-source "modern-day Library of Alexandria" that will be preserved in durable form and sent to the Moon, Mars and deep space. Musk said the project will eventually be renamed Encyclopedia Galactica and that copies will be "literally etched in stone" using a stone microfont to survive catastrophic loss. The current site lists 885,279 articles (the same count reported at launch), is publicly accessible for reuse and training, and briefly experienced a Cloudflare-related outage this week. For the AI/ML community the proposal is notable on two fronts: preservation and data utility. A widely distributed, open repository could become a canonical training corpus for models and a resilient archival layer for human knowledge, but it raises practical and technical questions about curation, provenance, versioning, licensing and long‑term readability (how to encode and retrieve stone-etched microfonts across millennia). Sending physical copies into space is largely symbolic but highlights durability priorities versus cloud redundancy. If realized, Grokipedia/Encyclopedia Galactica could influence dataset standards and governance for future model training — but its current static article count and unclear update policy suggest substantial work remains before it becomes the authoritative, machine‑friendly knowledge base Musk envisions.