The Grok AI logo is seen displayed on a smartphone with the Wikipedia logo in the background.
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Elon Musk launched an early version of an AI-powered encyclopedia called ‘Grokipedia’ on Monday, with its website temporarily crashing before coming back online hours later.
The new AI service, named after xAI’s large language model Grok, has been promoted by Musk as an improved and less biased version of the popular free and web-based Wikipedia.
The Tesla and SpaceX CEO announced last month that he was working on a Wikipedia rival after a suggestion from David Sacks, a fellow tech mogul who is serving as US President Donald Trump’s administration’s AI and crypto czar.
Musk, who has endorsed Germany’s far-right extremist party AfD, has previously lambasted Wikipedia as “woke” and criticized it for citing news outlets such as The New York Times and NPR as sources in many of its articles.
In a post on X , Musk said that the launch was only “Grokipedia version 0.1,” but that a later “version 1.0 will be 10X better.” However, he argued that the current version was better than Wikipedia.
Reports and copies of the site on the web archive, The Way Back Machine, indicate the site was down for a few hours.
The Grokipedia.com page features a search bar on a dark background and says it has logged 885,279 articles, which appear to be in a style reminiscent of Wikipedia.
For comparison, the Wikipedia website said it had over 7 million articles on its English Wikipedia as of Tuesday. Wikipedia’s articles are also written and edited by a community of volunteer writers and editors, while Grokipedia appears to be solely generated by AI.
Musk’s ‘anti-woke’ AI crusade continues
Grokipedia represents the latest application of xAI’s chatbots into Musk’s projects after Grok was integrated into the X social media platform.
Musk has also advertised Grok as an “anti-woke” and unbiased alternative to competitors like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
However, as noted by many media outlets and X users, both the Grok chatbot and Grokipedia itself commonly cite Wikipedia as a source when queried by users.
In a statement shared with CNBC, a Wikimedia Foundation spokesperson said the company was “still in the process of understanding how Grokipedia works,” but added that alternative versions of Wikipedia have appeared before and haven’t interfered with its work or mission.
When asked about accusations of bias, the spokesperson said that Wikipedia is written to inform billions of readers without promoting a particular point of view, adding that “unlike newer projects, Wikipedia’s strengths are clear: it has transparent policies, rigorous volunteer oversight, and a strong culture of continuous improvement.”
“Wikipedia’s knowledge is — and always will be — human. Through open collaboration and consensus, people from all backgrounds build a neutral, living record of human understanding — one that reflects our diversity and collective curiosity. This human-created knowledge is what AI companies rely on to generate content; even Grokipedia needs Wikipedia to exist,” it added.
Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales reportedly told the Washington Post last week that he didn’t have high expectations for Grokipedia as AI language models weren’t sophisticated enough and “there will be a lot of errors.”
On the other hand, Larry Sanger — a Wikipedia co-founder who resigned as editor and chief in 2002 and has long criticized its current editorial leadership — has previously shown enthusiasm about a new to Wikipedia.
However, following the launch of Grokipedia – Sanger posted a long thread pointing out what he called inaccuracies on the AI encyclopedia for himself.
