Elon Musk has launched “Grokipedia,” an AI-based alternative to Wikipedia. The billionaire had said last month that his team at xAI was building something that would be a “massive improvement over Wikipedia.”
“Frankly, it is a necessary step towards the xAI goal of understanding the Universe,” via X.
Grokipedia went live on Monday but according to The Washington Post, users experienced errors with the site. The page features a search bar on a dark background, and a font style similar to those used in Wikipedia and ChatGPT. The website’s landing page says Grokipedia is in “version v0.1” and has logged 885,279 articles.
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Musk, who was once an admirer of Wikipedia, has accused the platform of harboring a “liberal bias.” In 2019, he criticized his own Wikipedia page on X, which was then Twitter, saying it was a “war zone with a zillion edits.”
“Just looked at my wiki for 1st time in years. It’s insane!” Musk wrote in a December 2019 post. “Btw, can someone please delete ‘investor’. I do basically zero investing.” In December 2022, he stated that the platform had “a non-trivial left-wing bias.”
Musk also has a long-term online feud with Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales. In May 2023, Wales criticized Musk for restricting some content on Twitter in Turkey before the country’s presidential election. In November 2023, after Musk bought Twitter and rebranded it to X, Wales said X was overrun with “trolls and lunatics.”
Last week, Wales told The Washington Post that he didn’t have high expectations for Grokipedia because AI language models aren’t sophisticated enough and “there will be a lot of errors.”
Grokipedia articles are written by Musk’s Grok AI, and the site is similar to Wikipedia in its style, page structure and reference style. Grokipedia only has over 800,000 articles, while Wikipedia has over a million.
It is unclear how much human involvement is there in the creation of Grokipedia articles. Users do have an option to send feedback if they believe they’ve caught an error.
Musk said on X that the goal of Grok and Grokipedia 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 added. He also stated that he hopes to send copies of Grokipedia “etched in a stable oxide in orbit, the Moon and Mars to preserve it for the future.”
However, people have already noticed inaccuracies in Grokipedia articles. The Grokipedia entry on Musk said that the former presidential candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy, took up a prominent role in DOGE after Musk’s departure. That is incorrect. Ramaswamy left the group in January, months before Musk stepped down in May.
According to a Wired report, a number of Grokipedia entries highlighted conservative viewpoints, and sometimes contained historical inaccuracies.