Elon Musk launched an early version of Grokipedia, his AI-powered digital encyclopedia built to rival Wikipedia – which he has slammed as “Wokipedia,” accusing it of leftist bias.
The tech titan has railed against Wikipedia — which is reportedly cited in 70% of AI query results and is the top result for most Google searches about people or things — for frequently citing news outlets like the New York Times and NPR while leaving conservative outlets off its approved list of sources.
Grokipedia.com — named after Musk’s firm xAI’s chatbot Grok — said Tuesday it had 885,279 articles, ranging from profiles on President Donald Trump and New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani to pieces on the Israel-Hamas war.
A Wikipedia page on Hunter Biden’s laptop states, “Trump attempted to turn the story into an October surprise to hurt Joe Biden’s campaign by falsely alleging that, while in office, Biden had acted corruptly regarding Ukraine to protect his son.”
Grokipedia, on the other hand, simply notes a July 2023 poll by the Media Research Center that “found that 79% of Americans believed the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story affected the 2020 presidential election outcome,” with the majority of Republicans, Democrats and independents agreeing that more coverage would have led to a Trump victory.
Grokipedia’s content comes from generative AI, while Wikipedia – which launched in 2001 and boasts more than 7 million articles on its English site – relies on community volunteers.
On the COVID-19 pandemic, Wikipedia states that the lab leak theory is “not supported by evidence. Conspiracy theories about the virus’s origin have proliferated widely.”
Grokipedia wrote: “Scientific sentiment surveys indicate majority support for natural origins among virologists, but early dismissal of lab leak as conspiratorial – often by researchers with ties to WIV collaborators – suggests institutional biases may skew consensus.”
“Wow! I’m genuinely incredibly impressed,” a user wrote in a post on X. “I will literally never use Wikipedia again. Grokipedia is clearly much more factual and unbiased, and easier to read source documents.”
Wikipedia’s page on Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. calls him a “conspiracy theorist” and “anti-vaccine activist” in the first sentence.
Grokipedia mentions RFK Jr.’s vaccine stance later on in its entry, saying he has scrutinized “vaccine ingredients like thimerosal and the role of chronic disease in American health outcomes.”
Social media users quickly praised the new online encyclopedia for its transparency, noting readers can highlight any word or sentence and flag it for errors with the click of a button.
By Tuesday, Wikipedia launched its own page on Grokipedia, writing that its articles “have been described as manipulated to promote right-wing perspectives and the views of Elon Musk, medical misinformation, and for removing content disfavored by Musk.”
Social media users mocked the new Wiki page, calling it a “hit article” and accusing Wikipedia of being “terrified” of the new rival.
When asked for comment on accusations of bias and inaccuracies, a press contact for xAI told The Post via email: “Legacy Media Lies.”
Some social media users argued Grokipedia is more honest than Wikipedia while others argued Musk’s site has a right-leaning slant.
Take The Post, for example, which Wikipedia labels as “an American conservative daily tabloid newspaper published in New York City.
Grokipedia, meanwhile, describes it as “a provocative tabloid known for its bold headlines, investigative reporting, and conservative-leaning commentary that often challenges prevailing narratives in mainstream media.”
Grokipedia’s page on Musk states that his “public persona blends innovative visionary with irreverent provocateur,” adding that he enjoys “morning donuts and multiple Diet Cokes daily.”
Musk said last month that he was working on a rival site following a suggestion from David Sacks, a billionaire tech entrepreneur who serves as Trump’s AI and crypto czar.
“Wikipedia has achieved a dominant position. I hope Grokipedia challenges it and is able to fix that,” Sacks said during an episode of his podcast.
“But the easier path might just be for Wikipedia to stop blackballing and censoring conservative publications, rather than having to rebuild that whole thing from scratch.”
In January, Musk called for people to stop contributing to Wikipedia after a page on him was edited to mention a one-armed gesture he made that critics compared to a Nazi salute.
“Since legacy media propaganda is considered a ‘valid’ source by Wikipedia, it naturally simply becomes an extension of legacy media propaganda!” Musk wrote in a post at the time.
Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales told the Washington Post last week that he believed Grokipedia would have “a lot of errors” if it relied solely on AI language models.
Larry Sanger, a Wikipedia co-founder who left in 2022 and has since criticized the site’s leadership, has previously backed the idea of a Wikipedia rival. But on Monday, he posted a long thread on X delving into what he called inaccuracies in the Grokipedia article about himself.
Wikipedia did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.
