Elon Musk appears to have launched Grokipedia, an alternative to Wikipedia, on Monday.
This comes shortly after the billionaire said on X 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,” he said in the September X post.
Grokipedia.com went live on Monday afternoon, but some users said they experienced errors with the site, according to the Washington Post.
screenshot
Business Insider was able to access Grokipedia.com shortly before 7:30 p.m. ET and view an entry for Musk.
The page features a search bar on a dark background, and a font style reminiscent of Wikipedia and ChatGPT.
The website’s landing page says Grokipedia is in “version v0.1” and has logged 885,279 articles.
For comparison, Wikipedia said on its website that as of Tuesday, it had 7,081,705 articles in the English Wikipedia.
screenshot
Representatives for Musk, X, xAI, and Wikipedia did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The project marks Musk’s latest attempt to challenge mainstream platforms he deems politically biased. Once an admirer of Wikipedia, Musk has accused it of harboring liberal viewpoints over the past few years and urged followers in January to “defund Wikipedia until balance is restored.”
In 2019, he criticized his own Wikipedia page on X, which was then Twitter, saying it was a “war zone with a zillion edits.”
Related stories
Business Insider tells the innovative stories you want to know
Business Insider tells the innovative stories you want to know
“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 posted on X that Wikipedia had a “non-trivial left-wing bias.”
Musk and Wikipedia’s cofounder, Jimmy Wales, also have a long-running online feud.
In May 2023, Wales criticized Musk for restricting some content on Twitter in Turkey before the country’s presidential election.
And in November 2023, after Musk rebranded Twitter to X, Wales said X was overrun with “trolls and lunatics.”
Responding to Wales’ comment saying Wikipedia was not for sale, Musk wrote in October 2023 that he would give the platform $1 billion if it changed its name to “Dickipedia.”
Wales told the Washington Post in an interview last week 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.”
At press time, Grokipedia’s entry on Musk says 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.
Grok, the AI chatbot developed by Musk’s xAI, has drawn criticism in the past for a series of high-profile mistakes. In one instance, the bot promoted a baseless conspiracy theory about “white genocide” in South Africa after being asked unrelated questions. Musk and X have addressed these errors and promised fixes.
In a June X post, Musk said he would use Grok to “rewrite the entire corpus of human knowledge, adding missing information and deleting errors.”
