US tech billionaire Elon Musk on Monday launched Grokipedia, an AI-powered online encyclopedia aimed at replacing mainstream encyclopedia Wikipedia.Grokipedia.com was launched in a low-key manner that afternoon, and the current version is v0.1. The site is similar in style and structure to Wikipedia, but is significantly smaller.The homepage of the website shows that it currently has 885,279 articles. By comparison, Wikipedia has over 8 million entries.
Shortly after Grokipedia went live, the site went down, but was restored that night.
Some Musk supporters expressed excitement about the launch of Grokipedia, but critics said its information contained false content or directly copied the original text of Wikipedia.
The content of some Grokipedia articles appears to be exactly the same as the text of the corresponding Wikipedia articles. Musk has previously said he hopes Grok will stop using Wikipedia pages as a source of information by the end of this year.
There are also some content differences between Grokipedia and Wikipedia. For example, Grokipedia's entry on President Donald Trump makes no mention of Trump's acceptance of a luxury jumbo jet as a gift from Qatar or his promotion of a cryptocurrency token named after himself, known as a "memecoin," while Wikipedia's entry on Trump includes a section devoted to conflicts of interest, both in terms of aircraft and memecoins.
However, the way Grokipedia operates differs from Wikipedia in at least one major way: there are no explicit human authors.
Wikipedia's content is written and edited by volunteers, who often participate anonymously, while Grokipedia said its articles are "fact-checked" by Grok, an AI chatbot developed by Musk's startup xAI. Visitors to Grokipedia cannot edit content directly, but can submit editorial suggestions through a pop-up form used to report error messages.
There is also some misinformation on Grokipedia. For example, Grokipedia wrote in its entry about Musk that Indian-born entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy (Vivek Ramaswamy) held an important position in the U.S. Department of Government Effectiveness (DOGE) after Musk left the department. The fact is that Ramaswamy left the department as early as January this year, and Musk only left at the end of May this year.
Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales said in an interview last week that he did not have high expectations for Grokipedia. It turned out that the complexity of the AI language model was not enough and "there will be a lot of errors."
Musk announced last month that he was developing a rival to Wikipedia at the suggestion of his friend and tech investor David Sacks, the Trump administration's head of artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency.
Musk has repeatedly criticized Wikipedia for being politically biased and becoming a propaganda tool for left-wing forces. He claimed that Grokipedia will be "unfiltered, unbiased, and uncensored" and allow any AI or human to call it freely. It is both a database and the underlying truth system for AI.
He recently posted on X that encyclopedias generated by artificial intelligence will be "very important to civilization" and a necessary step to "understand the universe."