Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX, has added a new creation to his growing tech empire — Grokipedia, an AI-written online encyclopaedia that he claims will be a “massive improvement over Wikipedia.” The billionaire launched the site on October 27, positioning it as a cleaner, more intelligent, and more “truth-seeking” version of the world’s most-used reference platform.
Musk had teased the idea in September on X (formerly Twitter), saying Grokipedia was a “necessary step” towards his xAI project’s mission of “understanding the Universe.”
At first glance, Grokipedia looks a lot like Wikipedia. The interface is minimalist, the layout familiar, and it already hosts over 885,000 articles, ranging from ChatGPT and Diane Keaton to the 2026 FIFA World Cup. The site identifies itself as version 0.1, and Musk has hinted that it will expand continuously through AI learning.
The launch wasn’t entirely smooth. Grokipedia went live on Monday morning and crashed within hours due to heavy traffic, but the site has since stabilised. Musk’s own entry on Grokipedia is notably different from the one on Wikipedia — describing his AI projects in glowing terms and praising his “truth-oriented” approach over “heavy regulation.”
However, several users and media outlets, including The Washington Post, noted that Grokipedia’s tone and facts often leaned favourably towards Musk, raising concerns about bias and objectivity.
While Grokipedia covers similar topics as Wikipedia, its perspective often differs. For instance, its entry on the US Capitol riots of January 6, 2021, claims that Democrats and mainstream media “exaggerated both its severity and President Donald Trump’s culpability.”
The page on gender also takes a more traditional view, defining it as “the binary classification of humans as male or female based on biological sex,” in contrast to Wikipedia’s broader explanation that includes social and cultural aspects.
Some entries have been found with factual inaccuracies. A section about Musk’s “Doge Department” incorrectly mentions that American entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy took a leading role after Musk’s departure — something that never happened.
Experts who reviewed early versions say Grokipedia exhibits a right-wing bias, a point that echoes Musk’s past criticism of Wikipedia for being “too woke.”
While Wikipedia is built on open, crowdsourced knowledge maintained by a global volunteer base, Grokipedia is largely AI-generated, drawing from the same language model that powers Musk’s Grok chatbot on X.
In simple terms, the system can pull data from X posts and external databases to auto-generate and update content. However, this also means that errors or biases from the AI model could flow straight into the articles.
To make things trickier, early users discovered that many Grokipedia pages were copied directly from Wikipedia, sometimes word-for-word. The Verge reported that Grokipedia’s content uses material licensed under Wikipedia’s Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 framework, meaning it legally can reuse and modify Wikipedia’s text — though it raises questions about originality.
Lauren Dickinson, spokesperson for the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, dryly commented: “Even Grokipedia needs Wikipedia to exist.”
Wikipedia’s co-founder Jimmy Wales told The Washington Post he doesn’t expect Grokipedia to challenge Wikipedia’s credibility. “AI language models aren’t yet sophisticated enough — there will be a lot of errors,” he said.
Meanwhile, Wikimedia Foundation’s Lauren Dickinson issued a statement emphasising that Wikipedia remains the only top website run by a non-profit, backed by transparent policies and volunteer oversight. “Many attempts to create Wikipedia alternatives have come and gone. We’ll keep doing what we do best — providing free, trustworthy knowledge,” she wrote.
