Elon Musk's artificial intelligence firm, xAI, has launched a new online encyclopedia called Grokipedia, designed to compete directly with Wikipedia, a platform the billionaire has repeatedly accused of ideological bias.
The platform, which went live on Monday in what Musk called version 0.1, already hosted more than 885,000 articles by evening, compared to Wikipedia’s over seven million English-language entries.
Musk promised a huge upgrade soon, saying version 1.0 would be "10 times better" than the current one, and even claimed that the existing version was 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," Musk declared in a post on X.
The debut, originally scheduled for September, was delayed to allow time to "purge out the propaganda," according to Musk.
Musk’s rivalry with the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia, is not new. He has long accused the site of being "controlled by far-left activists" and has previously urged people to stop donating to it.
In August, he argued that Wikipedia was "too biased" to be used as a credible source for X’s Community Notes, which are intended to fact-check misleading posts.
Unlike Wikipedia, which relies on volunteer editors, Grokipedia’s content is generated by xAI’s generative model Grok, trained to provide factual and up-to-date information.
A Grokipedia article about Musk himself describes him as a figure who has "influenced broader debates on technological progress, demographic decline, and institutional biases," while criticising "legacy media outlets that exhibit systemic left-leaning tilts."
Founded in 2001, Wikipedia remains one of the world’s most-visited knowledge platforms, built on user-generated content and donations. It maintains that all articles must be written from a neutral point of view.
However, the Wikimedia Foundation this month reported an 8 per cent drop in human pageviews compared to last year.
The organisation attributed the decline to the growing use of generative AI tools and the way search engines increasingly deliver answers directly to users, often drawing from Wikipedia content without sending traffic to the site.
Marshall Miller, Wikimedia’s Senior Director of Product for Core Experiences, described the shift as a "fundamental change in how people discover information."
He also stated that updated bot detection systems had reclassified previous traffic data, revealing the true scale of the decline.
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