Directly challenging the established world of online knowledge, Elon Musk’s xAI company launched Grokipedia on Monday, October 27.
Grokipedia is an AI-generated encyclopedia that developed its brand identity as a truth-seeking alternative to what Musk alleges is the “left-biased” and “activist-controlled” Wikipedia.
As mentioned on the original site, “version 0.1” was released with more than 885,000 articles, which is just a fraction of Wikipedia’s more than seven million English language entries.
However, Musk increases his enthusiasm by quoting on X (formerly known as Twitter) that “even at 0.1 it’s better than Wikipedia” and promising that “version 1.0 will be 10 times better.”
The release builds on Musk’s years of criticism directed at Wikipedia. Musk repeatedly alleged that the free, nonprofit online encyclopedia is actually run by “far-left activists” and has “extremely left-biased” editorial content.
SpaceX’s CEO previously urged his followers to defund him.
“The goal of Grok and Grokipedia is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. We will never be perfect, but we will still strive to achieve that goal,” he added.
This statement highlights a significant clash in how knowledge is curated.
Founded in 2001, Wikipedia is supported by a global community of human volunteers who write and edit articles following a strict “neutral point of view” policy. Wikipedia’s funding source is mainly donations.
On the other hand, Grokipedia is completely curated and “verified” by xAI assistant Grok. The approach is already coming under fire, as AI-based models have been known to “hallucinate” or invent facts.
For now, the site does not allow human editing unlike Wikipedia. But Musk cited that ultimately Grokipedia will allow people to modify articles and AI will have the final say.
