Elon Musk, the Tesla chief executive officer (CEO), ambitiously rolled out "Grokipedia" to replace the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, but it showed instability from day one, including the site stopping operation.
On the 27th (local time), according to the Washington Post (WP), Musk unveiled an early version of Grokipedia that day, but the site stopped functioning after an hour and resumed operation in the evening. WP said that when Grokipedia was unveiled, its style and format were similar to Wikipedia, and that there were articles on a range of topics, including ChatGPT, Hollywood actor Diane Keaton, who recently died, and the 2026 FIFA World Cup.
Musk first mentioned the development of Grokipedia on X (formerly Twitter), a social media (SNS) platform, on the 30th of last month. It was a reply to a post by venture investor David Sacks on X pointing out Wikipedia's bias. He explained that xAI, the artificial intelligence (AI) Start - Up he leads, "is building an improved version over Wikipedia, and this also aligns with xAI's goal of understanding the universe."
As Musk has criticized Wikipedia for a left-leaning bias, Grokipedia showed a right-leaning tendency. Grokipedia defined sex as "the binary classification of humans into male and female based on biological sex." In contrast, Wikipedia explains that "gender refers to the range of social, psychological, cultural, and behavioral aspects related to being male (or a boy), female (or a girl), or belonging to a third gender."
Some topics also featured exaggerated descriptions. Grokipedia claimed that Musk's direction for AI development "emphasizes AI safety through truth-oriented development rather than excessive regulation." It also described xAI's underlying model, "Grok," by saying, "Musk emphasizes that Grok's design aims for maximal truth-seeking and minimal censorship."
Also, Vivek Ramaswamy, who served as co-head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) with Musk, left DOGE in January, but Grokipedia says, "After Musk left in May, DOGE emphasized sustained and less aggressive efficiency, and Ramaswamy took on a more prominent role." This is the exact opposite of the facts.
Grokipedia is based on "Grok," an AI model developed by xAI and a chatbot on X. Because of this, there are concerns that mistakes Grok made in the past could be repeated on Grokipedia. In May, when a user on X posted a photo of a walking trail and asked Grok, "Where is this?," Grok gave a completely off-base answer: "The location of a landscape photo likely unrelated to the South Africa white violence incident." At the time, NBC News reported that a review of Grok's activity on X found more than 20 responses containing references related to South Africa.
Although Musk is putting forward Grokipedia as an alternative to Wikipedia, assessments say it falls short of Wikipedia in performance and volume of information. Grokipedia offers about 885,000 entries, which is only about one-tenth compared with more than 8 million on the English Wikipedia. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales said in an interview with WP last week, "AI language models are still not good enough to write encyclopedia articles and have many errors," adding that he does not have high expectations for Grokipedia.