Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, has launched Grokipedia, an AI-generated encyclopedia to compete with Wikipedia. At launch on Monday, the platform reportedly housed over 800k articles.
Announcing the platform via an X post on Monday, Elon Musk stated that the goal of Grokipedia is to present the truth and remain unbiased in every search result. For a while, the billionaire had held the notion that Wikipedia’s search results have an element of unfair representation.
However, Musk noted that while Grokipedia is not perfect yet, it will keep working towards that goal.
“The goal of Grok and Grokipedia.com is 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.
Earlier in October, Elon Musk announced that Grokipedia was being developed by xAI and was meant to be an alternative to Wikipedia. He also criticised Wikipedia for political bias and explained that the new project will be a necessary step to help xAI understand the universe. He claimed that it would be a significant improvement over Wikipedia.
Musk’s announcement was in response to a post from White House AI czar and Silicon Valley investor David Sacks, who has been a prominent critic of Wikipedia.
In his post, Sacks claimed that “Wikipedia is hopelessly biased. An army of left-wing activists maintains the bios and fights reasonable corrections.” In response, the X-owner boosted posts from Wikipedia’s critics, accusing it of having a left-wing bias, and labelled the crowdsourced platform “wokepedia.”
For now, Grokipedia’s design still looks basic at its early stage. Like Wikipedia, the homepage contains a big search bar, and the entries resemble very basic Wikipedia entries, with headings, subheadings, and citations.
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Grokipedia still relies on Wikipedia
After it went live on Monday afternoon, the platform reportedly had over 800k AI-generated articles, according to The New York Times. In comparison, Wikipedia has almost 8 million articles written by humans.
Meanwhile, a disclaimer on Grokipedia suggests the platform still relies on Wikipedia for generating articles. Several articles on the platform include a disclaimer that reads: “The content is adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.”
In addition, Wikipedia’s website already has an entry on Grokipedia, which notes that “Many articles are derived from Wikipedia articles, with some articles observed to be copied nearly verbatim.” Some articles on Grokipedia also appeared to be near-identical copies of the corresponding Wikipedia entries.
Grokipedia also does not allow its users to make any edits compared to Wikipedia, which does allow. Meanwhile, Musk said users will be able to ask Grok to add/modify/delete articles, and it will either take the action or tell you it won’t and why.
Musk had noted that Grokipedia intends to fact-check claims before showing results. However, he said that he’s aware of Grokipedia using Wikipedia articles and added that the issue will be fixed by December 2025.
He already mentioned in an X post that the platform’s version 1.0 will be better. “Version 1.0 will be 10X better, but even at 0.1 it’s better than Wikipedia.”
The latest development comes amid heated competition in the use of artificial intelligence to reshape search content.
Last week, OpenAI introduced its own web browser, putting the ChatGPT maker in direct competition with Google as more internet users rely on artificial intelligence to answer their questions.
The company called it a rare, once-a-decade opportunity to rethink what a browser can be about and how to use one. The move makes its popular AI chatbot a gateway to online searches and could see it rake in more internet traffic and the revenue made from digital advertising.
