27 October 2025 – Tech billionaire Elon Musk and his AI company, xAI, have launched a new project, Grokipedia, an online encyclopedia designed to rival the Wikimedia Foundation’s Wikipedia.
Why was Grokipedia launched?
Elon Musk’s long-standing criticism of Wikipedia—often describing it as biased, left-wing and favouring certain perspectives—saw him announce on 30 September 2025 that xAI was building Grokipedia, “a massive improvement over Wikipedia.” Nearly a month later, a new online encyclopedia is live with 885,279 English articles. Shortly after launch, Grokipedia.com experienced a brief outage that lasted two hours for some users.
Unlike Wikipedia, launched in 2001 and now hosting over 65 million volunteer-edited articles, Grokipedia is maintained by AI with human fact-checking. Visitors cannot edit articles for now, but the site is free to use and open source.
Elon Musk on X: “Anyone can use it for anything at no cost”
He followed up with another post: “The goal of Grok and Grokipedia.com is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. We will never be perfect, but we shall nonetheless strive towards that goal.”
Musk made these comments in response to an X user who compared how George Floyd is described on Wikipedia versus Grokipedia.
Grokipedia Launch (Interface)
Grokipedia launched in version 0.1, with Musk tweeting that “Version 1.0 will be 10X better, but even at 0.1 it’s better than Wikipedia imo.”
At launch, the site displays a dark black screen, “Grokipedia v0.1”, a search bar, and “Articles Available: 885,279” at the bottom. The interface closely resembles that of Grok AI.
Grokipedia vs Wikipedia (Comparison)
Built on Elon Musk’s belief of “purge out the propaganda,” Grokipedia presents itself as a challenge to perceived media and editorial bias. However, early visitors have noted that several entries carry conservative-leaning or contested framing.
For instance, Grokipedia’s entry for “Gender” starts with:
“Gender refers to the binary classification of humans as male or female based on biological sex…”
By contrast, Wikipedia’s version reads:
“Gender is the range of social, psychological, cultural, and behavioural aspects of being a man (or boy), woman (or girl), or third gender.”
Grokipedia Needs Wikipedia – Wikimedia Response
In a statement shared with the media, Wikimedia Foundation, which hosts Wikipedia, wrote, “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. Many experiments to create alternative versions of Wikipedia have happened before; it doesn’t interfere with our work or mission.”
Larry Sanger, Wikipedia’s co-founder and longtime critic of its editorial direction, has expressed cautious support for Grokipedia. In a recent post on X, he wrote:
“My initial impression, looking at my own article and poking around here and there, is that Grokipedia is very OK. The jury’s still out as to whether it’s actually better than Wikipedia. But at this point I would have to say “maybe”!”
Grokipedia Website Not Appearing in Google Search Results
Amidst other debates around this topic, some online claim that Grokipedia’s absence from Google search results is intentional, while others argue the new web domain simply needs time to be indexed. I hope that by the time you’re reading this, Grokipedia.com is appearing in your search results. Only time will tell if it becomes a true rival to Wikipedia.
