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Aiming to challenge what he perceives as ideological bias, Elon Musk's company xAI has launched Grokipedia, an online encyclopedia intended to compete with Wikipedia. The new site, currently in its initial version (0.1), had amassed over 885,000 articles by Monday evening. While significantly smaller than Wikipedia's extensive collection of over seven million English-language articles, Musk claims the existing Grokipedia is already "better than Wikipedia" and that a future version 1.0 will be "10X better.”
Musk and the US Republican Party have frequently criticized Wikipedia, accusing a site that has become a living repository of human knowledge of being biased against right-wing ideas.
Musk, the world's richest person and owner of social media platform X, poured hundreds of millions into US President Donald Trump's election campaign, and claimed Grokipedia would carry "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
"We will never be perfect, but we shall nonetheless strive towards that goal," he said on X following the launch.
The content of Grokipedia is generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and the generative AI assistant Grok. Grokipedia's release had been slated for the end of September, but was delayed to "purge out the propaganda," Musk said in a separate X post.
In 2024, Musk accused Wikipedia of being "controlled by far-left activists" and called for donations to the platform to cease. In August, he stopped Twitter from using Wikipedia as a "definitive source for Community Notes, as the editorial control there is extremely left-biased." Trump-aligned officials have also taken aim at the site since the Republican returned to power in January.
Created in 2001, Wikipedia is a collaborative encyclopedia managed by volunteers, largely funded by donations. Its pages can be written or edited by internet users.
Several right-wing figures welcomed the launch of Grokipedia. Hardline Russian ideologue Alexander Dugin described the article about him as "neutral, objective, accurate," whereas Wikipedia's page, according to him, was, "totally biased and defamatory." Asked about the launch of Grokipedia, Wikimedia spokesperson Majange said the organization was "still in the process of understanding how Grokipedia works."
She highlighted that Wikimedia "is -- and always will be -- human." "This human-created knowledge is what AI companies rely on to generate content, even Grokipedia needs Wikipedia to exist."
