NEW YORK: 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,” 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, accusing the site in 2024 of being “controlled by far-left activists” and calling 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 and the generative AI assistant Grok.
A Grokipedia article about Musk states that the Tesla and SpaceX CEO has “influenced broader debates on technological progress, demographic decline, and institutional biases, often via X.”
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.
“Unlike newer projects, Wikipedia’s strengths are clear: it has transparent policies, rigorous volunteer oversight, and a strong culture of continuous improvement,” a spokeswoman from Wikimedia Foundation told AFP in an email.
It claims the site is written to inform “billions of readers without promoting a particular point of view.”
When asked about the launch of Grokipedia, the spokeswoman said Wikimedia is “still in the process of understanding how Grokipedia works.”
She highlighted that Wikimedia “is – and always will be – human.”
“This human-created knowledge is what AI companies rely on to generate content, even Grokipedia needs Wikipedia to exist.”
The birth of Grokipedia has been welcomed by several right-wing figures, including hardline Russian ideologue Alexander Dugin, who described the article about him as “neutral, objective, accurate” whereas Wikipedia’s page, according to him is, “totally biased and defamatory.” – AFP
