Elon Musk launches Grokipedia to compete with online encyclopedia Wikipedia
Elon Musk has launched Grokipedia, a crowdsourced online encyclopedia that the billionaire seeks to position as a rival to Wikipedia.
Writing on social media, Musk said that Grokipedia.com is “now live” and its goal is the “truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”
Musk has previously criticized Wikipedia for being filled with “propaganda” and called for people to stop donating to the site, which is run by a nonprofit. In September he announced that his artificial intelligence company xAI was working on Grokipedia.
The Grokipedia site has a minimalist appearance with little beyond a search bar where users can type in queries. It states that it has 885,279 articles. Wikipedia, meanwhile, says it has more than 7 million articles in English.
Like Wikipedia, users can search for articles on various topics such as Taylor Swift, the baseball World Series, or Buckingham Palace.
While Wikipedia is written and edited by volunteers, it's unclear how exactly Grokipedia articles are put together. Reports suggest the site is powered by the same xAI model that underpins Musk's Grok chatbot, but some articles are seemingly adapted from Wikipedia.
As a huge trove of well-constructed sentences with little restriction on how it's used, Wikipedia has been a key source used to train AI chatbots, including Grok's rivals ChatGPT and Google's Gemini. That's one reason Republican lawmakers in the U.S. Congress said they launched an investigation in August of alleged “manipulation efforts” in Wikipedia's editing process that could inject bias and undermine neutral points of view on its platform and the AI systems that rely on it.
Wikipedia encourages its volunteer editors to cite nearly every sentence or paragraph with a primary source, and sentences not verified can be challenged and removed. Some of Grokipedia's entries are thinly sourced, such as an entry on the Chola Dynasty of southern India that has three linked sources, compared to Wikipedia's that has 113 linked sources plus dozens of referenced books.
Grokipedia's entry on Wikipedia accuses the site of having “systemic ideological biases — particularly a left-leaning slant in coverage of political figures and topics.”
The San Francisco-based Wikimedia Foundation didn't immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday.
