Elon Musk has launched an early version of Grokipedia, his AI-powered digital encyclopedia built to rival Wikipedia – which he has slammed as “Wokipedia,” accusing it of leftist bias.
Named after his firm xAI’s chatbot Grok, the new website went live Monday after crashing for a few hours.
“Grokipedia.com version 0.1 is now live. Version 1.0 will be 10X better, but even at 0.1 it’s better than Wikipedia imo,” Musk wrote in a post on X, his social media platform, on Monday.
The tech titan has argued the new encyclopedia will be less biased than Wikipedia, which he has railed against for frequently citing news outlets like the New York Times and NPR.
The Tesla and SpaceX founder said last month that he was working on a rival site following a suggestion from David Sacks, a billionaire tech entrepreneur who serves as President Trump’s “AI and crypto czar.”
Grokipedia.com has a black background with a dark search bar in the middle of the page. The site said it had 885,279 articles as of Tuesday afternoon.
Wikipedia – which launched in 2001 – boasts more than 7 million articles on the English version of the site alone. Its articles are written and edited by community volunteers, while Grokipedia’s content comes from generative AI.
Social media users were quick to compare the rival online encyclopedias’ results for the same terms and phrases. Some praised Grokipedia, arguing it provided more honest responses, while others argued Musk’s site had a right-leaning slant.
When asked for comment on accusations of bias and inaccuracies, a press contact for xAI told The Post via email: “Legacy Media Lies.”
Wikipedia’s page on Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. calls him a “conspiracy theorist” and “anti-vaccine activist” in its first sentence, alongside his work as a politician, author and lawyer.
Grokipedia, meanwhile, focuses on RFK Jr.’s political career, not mentioning until later in the first paragraph that he has scrutinized “public health policies, particularly vaccine ingredients like thimerosal and the role of chronic disease in American health outcomes.”
“Wikipedia smears RFK Jr as a ‘conspiracy theorist and anti-vaccine activist’ in the first sentence, while Grokipedia sticks to the facts,” a social media user wrote in a post. “I’m switching to Grokipedia.”
Musk’s new encyclopedia drew some backlash for its page on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which cites the Kremlin multiple times.
“Funny that Musk, who says Wikipedia is biased, lets Grokipedia use the Kremlin as a source. Totally unbiased,” wrote one X user.
Users also noted that Grokipedia and xAI’s Grok chatbot commonly cite Wikipedia as a source.
When asked, Grok will point out factual errors and logical fallacies in Grokipedia’s own content.
Wikipedia, for example, writes that George Floyd “was an African American man who was murdered by a white police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota, during an arrest made after a store clerk suspected Floyd had used a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill.”
The corresponding page from Grokipedia states that Floyd “was an American man with a lengthy criminal record including convictions for armed robbery, drug possession, and theft in Texas from 1997 to 2007.”
When asked to review that page for errors and logical fallacies, Musk’s chatbot responded: “The Grokipedia page appears heavily biased toward a skeptical or conservative ‘alternative perspective,’ emphasizing Floyd’s criminal history, overdose theories, riot damages, and media critiques while downplaying or omitting consensus views on homicide and systemic racism.”
It added: “Unlike Wikipedia’s neutral point of view, this page reads like an opinion piece, with loaded language.”
The types of content available on Grokipedia and Wikipedia also differ. While Wikipedia has a “Gaza genocide” page and a “Palestinian genocide accusation page,” Grokipedia only offers the latter.
Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales told the Washington Post last week that he believed Grokipedia would have “a lot of errors” if it relied solely on AI language models.
Larry Sanger, a Wikipedia co-founder who left in 2022 and has since criticized the site’s leadership, has previously backed the idea of a Wikipedia rival. But on Monday, he posted a long thread on X delving into what he called inaccuracies in the Grokipedia article about himself.
Wikipedia did not immediately respond to noti.group’s request for comment.
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
