Tech mogul Elon Musk has officially rolled out “Grokipedia,” a new online knowledge encyclopedia positioned as a direct competitor to Wikipedia. The website was formally unveiled on Monday (October 27th), with Musk confirming the launch in a post on his social media platform, X.
This launch comes exactly one month after Musk’s company, xAI, announced on X that they were developing a platform that would be “vastly superior to Wikipedia.”
Musk had previously stated: “We are building Grokipedia at xAI. It will be vastly superior to Wikipedia. Frankly, it’s a necessary step toward xAI’s goal of understanding the universe.”
The Rollout and Interface
Following the launch of Grokipedia.com on Monday, some users reported issues accessing the site, according to The Washington Post. However, Business Insider managed to access the site by 7:30 PM local time and reported seeing a dedicated article about Musk himself.
The site features a dark interface, a search bar, and a font style similar to Wikipedia and ChatGPT. The homepage proudly displays “Grokipedia version v0.1” and claims to already have over 885,000 articles.
A Crusade Against ‘Bias’
Grokipedia is a key project in Musk’s mission to create alternatives to what he calls “politically biased mainstream platforms.”
Though he once praised Wikipedia, Musk has spent the last few years criticizing it as “liberal-biased.” In January 2024, he urged his followers to “stop funding Wikipedia until they are neutral.”
He has also criticized its editing process, noting back in 2019 that his own Wikipedia page was “a war zone,” joking that someone should remove the word ‘investor’ because he doesn’t really invest. In December 2022, he declared that Wikipedia’s “left-wing bias is non-trivial.”
The Musk vs. Wales Feud
The launch escalates a long-running public feud between Musk and Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales. The conflict intensified when Wales criticized Musk in May 2023 for limiting content on Twitter (now X) before the Turkish presidential election. Later that year, after Twitter was rebranded to X, Wales remarked that the platform was now “full of trolls and lunatics.”
Musk’s famous response was a playful jab: he offered to donate $1 billion if Wikipedia changed its name to “Dickipedia.”
In a recent interview with The Washington Post, Jimmy Wales expressed skepticism about Grokipedia, citing the unreliability of Artificial Intelligence: “It’s going to have a lot of errors,” Wales commented.
The AI Foundation
Grokipedia is built upon Grok, the AI chatbot developed by Musk’s xAI. Grok has faced controversy in the past, including an incident where it promoted a baseless conspiracy theory regarding a “white genocide” in South Africa. However, Musk and his team maintain they are working to eliminate such errors. In June, Musk posted that his goal was the “complete rewrite of the world’s information database,” by both adding missing data and deleting misinformation.
