Elon Musk and his company xAI launched Grokipedia on Monday, presenting it as a competitor to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which has been accused of ideological bias by some Republicans in the United States.

The version was numbered 0.1 and already had more than 885,000 definitions as of Monday evening, compared to more than 7 million in English for Wikipedia.

In a message posted on X, Elon Musk promised the imminent arrival of a version 1.0, "ten times better" than 0.1, which is already "better than Wikipedia in (his) opinion."

A week ago, the entrepreneur decided to postpone the launch of Grokipedia, announced for the end of September, by a few days, a delay justified by the need to carry out "additional work to purge the propaganda."

Like Republican officials, Elon Musk has been a regular critic of Wikipedia for several years. In 2024, he accused the site of being "controlled by far-left activists" and called for people to stop donating to the platform.

"The goal of Grok and (Grokipedia) is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth," said the world's richest man, who added that the encyclopedia's computer program was open source. "So anyone can use it for anything for free."

"Systemic biases"

The content of some Grokipedia articles reflects a bias in the results, such as the page dedicated to Elon Musk.

In the opening paragraphs of the summary, the platform states that the Tesla and SpaceX boss has "influenced the debate" on several issues, which has earned him "criticism from mainstream media outlets that show left-leaning coverage."

Regarding the "Black Lives Matter" civil rights movement, Grokipedia writes that it "mobilized millions of people."

"However, these protests led to riots, (...) the most expensive in the history of property damage insurance," the encyclopedia continues, without mentioning, as Wikipedia does, that "the vast majority of protests in 2020 took place peacefully."

Another example is the page dedicated to conservative columnist Tucker Carlson, which highlights his "role (...) in denouncing the systemic biases of traditional journalism." It links to an article on the Newsweek magazine website that only mentions these biases in quotes from Tucker Carlson himself.

Founded in 2001, Wikipedia is a collaborative encyclopedia run by volunteers, largely funded by donations, and whose pages can be written or edited by Internet users.

It claims a "neutral point of view" in its content.

Grokipedia's content is generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and the generative AI assistant Grok, but also cites multiple sources on each page.

In April, Washington's federal prosecutor, Ed Martin, since replaced, sent a request for documents to the Wikimedia Foundation, which has authority over Wikipedia.

He said he wanted to determine whether Wikimedia was entitled to the tax exemption granted to foundations.

The prosecutor appointed by Donald Trump had denounced the "manipulation of information" of which Wikipedia was guilty, according to him, the platform seeking to "hide propaganda".

At the end of August, two Republican members of the House of Representatives, James Comer and Nancy Mace, opened an investigation into "organized maneuvers (...) to influence American opinion (...) by manipulating Wikipedia articles."

The creation of Grokipedia was welcomed by several right-wing figures, including Russian ultranationalist ideologue Alexander Dugin, who described the article about him as "neutral," "objective," and "fair," while the Wikipedia article, he said, was "defamatory."