SAN FRANCISCO — Elon Musk on Monday unveiled his own version of Wikipedia, the crowdsourced online encyclopedia, with entries edited by xAI, his artificial intelligence company.
The new project, Grokipedia, would “purge out the propaganda” flooding Wikipedia, Musk claimed in a post on his social media site, X.
Grokipedia, which briefly crashed after its launch Monday afternoon, tallied more than 800,000 AI-generated encyclopedia entries, compared with Wikipedia’s nearly 8 million human-written ones. Visitors to the website — grokipedia.com — were greeted with a bare-bones logo and a search bar that allowed them to query topics.
An entry on Musk said his public persona “blends innovative visionary with irreverent provocateur” and featured details of his diet, noting his consumption of “occasional indulgences like morning donuts and multiple Diet Cokes daily.” Grokipedia also has entries on OpenAI, a competitor of xAI, and political figures including President Donald Trump and the New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani.
The new site adds to Musk’s online media ecosystem, which coheres with his personal political views. On X, Musk has reinstated right-wing creators and allowed them to reach enormous audiences, and he has used X as a bully pulpit to drive government funding cuts. He has also tweaked xAI’s chatbot, Grok, to lean further to the right.
“The impulse to control knowledge is as old as knowledge itself,” said Ryan McGrady, a senior research fellow at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who studies encyclopedias and social media platforms. “Controlling what gets written is a way to gain or keep power.”
Some Grokipedia entries appeared to align with Musk’s views. On gender transition, which Musk has publicly opposed, the site said medical treatment for transgender people was based on evidence that was “limited and of low quality.” Wikipedia’s corresponding page said scientific understanding of the subject had existed for decades.
Musk was also a frequent critic of Parag Agrawal, a former CEO of Twitter, now X. Grokipedia’s entry on Agrawal highlighted Musk’s assertion that the former executive downplayed the existence of bots on the platform, and it said he had “faced significant scrutiny over the platform’s estimates of fake and spam accounts.” Those details were not found on Wikipedia.
A representative for xAI did not respond to questions about Grokipedia or the outage.
Wikipedia, which debuted almost 25 years ago, has faced increasing criticism from conservatives in recent months. Musk and his political allies have argued that the online encyclopedia is too “woke” and excludes conservative media outlets from its approved citations.
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