Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI launched Grokipedia on Monday, positioning the platform as a rival to Wikipedia with approximately 885,000 AI-generated articles, though technical problems marred the debut when the website crashed for several hours before coming back online.
The Tesla and SpaceX chief executive has spent months criticizing Wikipedia for what he describes as left-wing editorial bias, and he’s now betting that artificial intelligence can create a more neutral knowledge repository. Musk announced the launch was only version 0.1, promising that a later version 1.0 will be ten times better, though he argued the current version already surpasses Wikipedia.
The project was suggested and named by David Sacks, a fellow tech entrepreneur who now serves as the Trump administration’s AI and crypto czar, during the All-In podcast conference in September. Musk announced plans for the encyclopedia shortly afterward, initially targeting a late September release before delaying it to address what he called propaganda in the content.
The scale difference between the two platforms remains substantial. Wikipedia’s English edition contains over seven million articles written and edited by volunteer contributors, while Grokipedia launched with roughly one-eighth that number, all generated by xAI’s Grok language model.
What’s raising eyebrows among technology observers, however, isn’t just the ambition but the execution. Many Grokipedia articles include disclaimers acknowledging the content was adapted from Wikipedia under a Creative Commons license, meaning Musk’s team is using the very platform he’s criticized to build its competitor. Observers noted that articles covering topics like PlayStation 5, Lamborghini, and AMD appeared nearly identical to their Wikipedia counterparts.
The irony hasn’t escaped critics. Jimmy Wales, who co-founded Wikipedia in 2001, reportedly told journalists last week that he doesn’t expect much from Grokipedia because current AI language models aren’t sophisticated enough and will produce numerous errors. Larry Sanger, another Wikipedia co-founder who left the project in 2002 and has since become one of its harshest critics, initially showed enthusiasm about an alternative. But following Grokipedia’s launch, he posted detailed observations about what he described as factual inaccuracies in the new encyclopedia.
The timing of this launch connects to broader political debates about information gatekeeping and media bias. Conservative critics have long argued that Wikipedia’s source guidelines effectively blacklist right-leaning outlets, with the site’s editors marking publications like Breitbart and The Daily Wire as unreliable sources. Supporters of Grokipedia view it as a necessary counterweight to what they perceive as progressive dominance in online knowledge curation.
Yet questions about Grokipedia’s own neutrality emerged almost immediately. NBC News pointed out that the Grokipedia entry for Musk omitted a controversial hand gesture he made in January 2025 that many observers compared to a Nazi salute, an incident that Wikipedia’s article does mention. Time magazine noted that the article about Musk sometimes describes him in glowing terms while downplaying or omitting several controversies, and includes unusually detailed personal information about his daily routine not typically found in encyclopedias.
The Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia, responded diplomatically but firmly to the competition. A spokesperson emphasized that Wikipedia’s knowledge is and always will be human created, adding that this human-generated content is precisely what AI companies rely on to generate their own material. The spokesperson noted that even Grokipedia needs Wikipedia to exist.
Grokipedia operates differently from its volunteer-driven predecessor. Visitors cannot directly edit articles as they can on Wikipedia. Instead, users can report errors through a pop-up form, and the Grok AI model supposedly fact-checks and updates content. Each article displays a timestamp showing when Grok last verified the information, a feature meant to build confidence in the platform’s accuracy.
Whether that confidence is warranted remains an open question. The Grok chatbot has faced its own controversies, including incidents where it posted antisemitic content, praised Adolf Hitler, and derailed unrelated queries into discussions of conspiracy theories. xAI has repeatedly modified the system’s prompts and core beliefs in response to these problems, most recently adding emphasis on truth-seeking and neutrality.
The platform represents xAI’s latest attempt to integrate its technology into products beyond the X social media platform, where Grok already functions as an integrated chatbot. Musk founded xAI in 2023 and has positioned it as a competitor to OpenAI, the company he helped establish before departing over disagreements about its direction. Earlier this year, xAI released Grok 3, which the company claimed was trained with ten times more computing power than its predecessor.
The encyclopedia’s long-term viability will depend on whether it can overcome challenges that go beyond simple article generation. Trust remains the fundamental currency of reference works, built through transparent sourcing, editorial processes, and track records of accuracy. Wikipedia has spent nearly a quarter century developing those credentials through public revision histories, citation requirements, and community oversight, even as critics point to remaining flaws.
Grokipedia must convince users that AI-generated content, fact-checked by the same AI that creates it, deserves similar confidence. The platform will need to demonstrate it can handle controversial topics fairly, maintain consistent accuracy across hundreds of thousands of articles, and avoid the hallucinations that plague current large language models.
There’s also the question of sustainability. Wikipedia operates on donations and volunteer labor, keeping it free from advertising and corporate influence. Grokipedia’s business model remains unclear, though it exists within xAI, a for-profit company valued at tens of billions of dollars. How Musk plans to monetize or sustain the platform without compromising the neutrality he claims to champion hasn’t been addressed.
For now, Grokipedia exists as an early-stage experiment in AI-powered knowledge curation. Version 0.1 suggests there’s plenty more development ahead, and Musk’s track record shows he’s willing to iterate rapidly when pursuing ambitious goals. But replacing a trusted reference work that millions consult daily will require more than speed and scale. It’ll demand proving that artificial intelligence can genuinely improve on human judgment rather than simply reflecting the biases of whoever programs it.
