Elon Musk's new Grokipedia takes on Wikipedia

ELON Musk on Monday launched an early version of Grokipedia, an online encyclopedia written by AI that the billionaire has touted as a less biased alternative to the venerable online resource Wikipedia.

The site resembles Wikipedia in style and format, with articles on topics such as ChatGPT, Diane Keaton and the 2026 FIFA World Cup. But it appears significantly smaller, more opaque in its workings - and more right-leaning in how it framed some articles.

Grokipedia’s entry on gender, for instance, begins with the sentence: “Gender refers to the binary classification of humans as male or female based on biological sex....” Wikipedia’s starts with: “Gender is the range of social, psychological, cultural, and behavioral aspects of being a man (or boy), woman (or girl), or third gender.”

The project is Musk’s latest bid to harness Grok, the ChatGPT-like AI system developed by his company xAI, to offer right-leaning, freewheeling alternatives to popular mainstream tech tools. Some Musk admirers greeted its debut with excitement Monday, while critics highlighted examples of articles that contained falsehoods or passages that copied Wikipedia verbatim.

Musk’s own Grokipedia entry differed strikingly from Wikipedia’s page about him. It described some of his pursuits in breathless terms, saying his pushes for artificial intelligence “emphasize AI safety through truth-oriented development rather than heavy regulation” and that certain releases “reflect xAI’s rapid iteration, with Musk highlighting Grok’s design for maximal truth-seeking and reduced censorship.” Grokipedia cited the website of xAI, which Musk owns, to make that point.

On the section about Musk’s work in the U.S. DOGE Service, Grokipedia included an error regarding Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, asserting that he assumed “a more prominent role” after Musk’s departure in May. In fact, Ramaswamy left the group before it became part of Trump’s administration in January.

To support the false claim, Grokipedia cited articles from the BBC and Al Jazeera, neither of which mentioned Ramaswamy.

In contrast to Wikipedia’s “Accolades” section, Musk’s Grokipedia page concluded with a section titled “Recognition and Long-Term Vision” that expounded on his beliefs: “His long-term vision prioritizes safeguarding human consciousness against existential threats, emphasizing the establishment of a self-sustaining multi-planetary civilization as a hedge against planetary-scale catastrophes on Earth,” it said.

A Grokipedia page on the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol blended factual accounts of the event with suggestions that Democrats and the mainstream media had exaggerated both its severity and President Donald Trump’s culpability.

At launch, Grokipedia’s homepage boasted that the site has about 885,000 articles, whereas the English-language Wikipedia has more than 8 million.

The site went live on Monday without fanfare or explanation, a week after the date Musk had initially set for its launch. On Oct. 20, he said he was postponing the launch to the end of that week, explaining, “We need to do more work to purge out the propaganda.”

A minimalist homepage bore the title “Grokipedia v0.1” and a search bar where users could type in queries. About an hour after it went live on Monday, the site went down, resurfacing later Monday evening.

Grokipedia’s articles appeared to be derived the same large language model that underlies the Grok chatbot on X, formerly Twitter, which Musk purchased and renamed in 2022. That could mean it has access, at least in theory, to the latest X posts from the site’s hundreds of millions of users, which it can use to inform articles and keep them up-to-date.

It could also make Grokipedia prone to the sort of high-profile gaffes that have dogged the Grok chatbot at times. Earlier this year, the bot began spouting a conspiracy theory about “white genocide” in South Africa in response to unrelated questions. In other instances, it has spewed antisemitic slurs, generated images that virtually “undressed” female X users, and confidently misdiagnosed an injury. (In each case, Musk or X blamed coding errors and eventually remedied the issue.)

In 2017, Musk tweeted, “I love Wikipedia. Just gets better over time.” But the billionaire entrepreneur soured on the site in recent years, taking issue at times with how its “Elon Musk” article portrayed him and accusing it of liberal bias as Musk’s own politics grew more conservative. Earlier this year he tweeted: “Defund Wikipedia until balance is restored!”

The owner of X and xAI has joined a chorus of right-leaning critics, including an ousted Wikipedia co-founder, who say the online encyclopedia - which has a policy of remaining neutral on ideological debates - too often holds up a liberal lens to hot-button issues such as climate science, vaccines and the Israel-Gaza conflict. Musk announced his intention to build Grokipedia on Sept. 29, in response to an X post from President Donald Trump’s AI czar, Silicon Valley investor David Sacks, who called Wikipedia “hopelessly biased.”

Ahead of Grokipedia’s launch, some observers said they expected it to draw heavily on Wikipedia for its content.

“Every major AI system trains on Wikipedia’s freely licensed knowledge,” said Stephen Harrison, a journalist and author who has covered Wikipedia extensively, on Friday. “The irony is that Grokipedia will be built on the unpaid labor of the volunteer Wikipedia editors Musk has gone out of his way to vilify.”

In an interview with The Post last week, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales said he would be curious to see Grokipedia when it launched but didn’t have high expectations.

AI language models “aren’t good enough to write encyclopedia articles,” Wales said. “There will be a lot of errors.”