THE NEW YORK TIMES: Elon Musk challenges Wikipedia with his own AI encyclopedia

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.”

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.

Jimmy Wales, a Wikipedia co-founder, said in an interview that he did not think AI could replace the site’s accuracy. He is leading an internal working group that is focused on promoting neutral points of view and developing guidelines to encourage academic research into potential biases on Wikipedia, he added.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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