Elon Musk’s company xAI launched Grokipedia on Monday to compete with online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which he has accused of ideological bias.
The site dubbed version 0.1 had more than 885,000 articles by Monday evening, compared to Wikipedia’s more than seven million in English.
The launch came with the promise of a newer version 1.0, which Musk said would be “10X better” than the current live site, which he claimed is already “better than Wikipedia.”
“The goal of Grok and Grokipedia.com 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 said on X following the launch.
Grokipedia’s release had been marked down for the end of September, but was delayed by the US entrepreneur to “purge out the propaganda,” Musk said in a separate X post.
Musk has been a regular critic of Wikipedia. In 2024, he accused the site of being “controlled by far-left activists” and called for donations to the platform to cease.
In August, he said “Wikipedia cannot be used as a definitive source for Community Notes, as the editorial control there is extremely left-biased.”
The content of Grokipedia is generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and the generative AI assistant Grok.
A Grokipedia article dedicated to Musk states that the Tesla and SpaceX CEO has “influenced broader debates on technological progress, demographic decline, and institutional biases, often via X,” amid what the page says are “criticisms from legacy media outlets that exhibit systemic left-leaning tilts in coverage.”
Created in 2001, Wikipedia is a collaborative encyclopedia managed by volunteers, largely funded by donations, and whose pages can be written or edited by internet users.
It claims a “neutral point of view” in its content.
Wikipedia Human Traffic Declines
Meanwhile, the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) this month reported an 8% decline in human pageviews on Wikipedia compared to the same period last year, a trend the organisation attributes to the rise of generative AI and changes in information access via search and social media platforms.
Marshall Miller, Senior Director of Product, Core Experiences at the Wikimedia Foundation, wrote that the decline reflects a fundamental change in how the public discovers information. He suggested that search engines are now “providing answers directly to searchers, often based on Wikipedia content,” effectively leveraging Wikipedia as source material without directing traffic to the site itself.
The reported decline follows an update to WMF’s bot detection systems. After observing unusually high traffic around May that appeared human but was later identified as bots designed to evade detection, WMF applied a new logic to reclassify traffic from March through August. Miller noted the revised data shows “a decrease of roughly 8% as compared to the same months in 2024.”
