Musk's new Grokipedia crashes on launch day
The website briefly went online on Monday before promptly crashing, though it is currently back up and running.
Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, launched an early version of Grokipedia on Monday, which is said to be an AI-generated encyclopaedia to compete with Wikipedia.
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The billionaire Tesla founder, who has long criticised Wikipedia for what he calls "editorial bias," previously described Grokipedia as a more "truthful and independent alternative."
The Grokipedia website claims that: "The GrokPedia is more than a wiki—it’s a movement to democratize truth."
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Powered by Grok, xAI’s chatbot trained on real-time data, the platform aims to change how online knowledge is created and shared.
Grokipedia officially went live at grokipedia.com, though the launch faced immediate setbacks. The site went live in the afternoon but crashed within hours, before returning online later that evening.
At launch, the platform also hosted 885,279 articles, though many early users said that large portions appeared to be adapted or copied directly from Wikipedia.
For comparison, the Wikipedia website said it had over 7 million articles on its English Wikipedia as of Tuesday.
Wikipedia’s articles are also written and edited by a community of volunteer writers and editors, while Grokipedia appears to be solely generated by AI.
Musk has been a vocal critic of Wikipedia and previously labelled it as “woke” and criticised it for citing news outlets such as The New York Times and NPR as sources in many of its articles.
The release of the new site marks a step in Musk’s effort to build AI systems that challenge mainstream narratives.