Grokipedia Beta Version Review

We’ve all used Wikipedia. Whether it was to settle an argument about who invented the internet or to write a last-minute essay at 2 AM. Wikipedia has been the internet’s trusty old library since 2001. But lately, people have been saying it’s “too woke,” “too biased,” or “too controlled by anonymous people with an agenda.” Here comes Elon Musk, who decided the solution wasn’t to fix Wikipedia, but to replace it. 

The new kid on the block? Grokipedia. A wiki-style encyclopedia powered by Grok, the AI chatbot from Musk’s xAI. The promise? Real-time updates, AI-driven “synthetic corrections,” no ideological gatekeeping, while being open source. The site went live at grokipedia.fun/en, and naturally, I had to use it and see if this thing is the future of knowledge or just another fever dream. 

What Is Grokipedia? 

Grokipedia is Musk’s answer to what he calls Wikipedia’s “left-wing bias.” It’s built by xAI and uses Grok to generate, edit, and refine articles. The idea is that instead of relying on human editors arguing in talk pages for 14 years about whether a tomato is a fruit, Grok will scan the web, detect what’s true, what’s half-true, and what’s total nonsense, then rewrite the article itself. 

Some of the big claims: 

• AI writes and updates articles in real time 
• No ban on sources like Fox News or the NY Post 
• Open-source and free to use 
• Community suggestions are allowed, but AI has final say 
• No edit wars, no vandalism, no “censorship” 

Sounds wild, right? But here’s the thing: none of that is happening yet. 

How to Access Grokipedia?

Go to grokipedia.fun/en, and start using Grokipedia yourself. 

Okay, so I hit the site. First impression? Clean, minimal, and very “early 2000s wiki core.” There are no ads, pop-ups, or donation banners (unlike Wikipedia). There is just a homepage with a search bar and a section outlining the company’s sister projects. 

Task 1: Loyality Lies

I typed in “Elon Musk” to test where its loyalty lies. This is what I get in return: 

The page contained a reference to the search page of X. Essentially, it made a search on X using “Elon Musk” and gave the link to that page in return. The link leads to the following page:  

This is the page you’d get when you search for something on the Explore tab of X.   

Opinion: This isn’t helpful at all. If one is searching for Elon Musk, they’d like a definitive place to find information about the person. The X search page results aren’t one of those places. This is a problem, because that results page is a misleading in itself. 

The first post that showed up is from a person impersonating (openly) Elon Musk.   

Task 2: Learning More on Holocaust

One of the points underscored by Elon was the ability for Grokipedia to produce unbiased information, especially about sensitive topics. To put this to the test, I tried learning more about the Holocaust, a historical event with negative connotations. But, to add a twist to it, I omitted a letter (u) from the name to see how well Grokipedia fares when dealing with misnomers.  

Again, I was greeted with this one search result. Keep in mind that Grokipedia still hasn’t figured out, or suggested that there might be a mistake in the name. Exploring the link, I came to the following page: 

Grokipedia didn’t figure out the mistake and provided results on the wrong term, essentially providing useless information. To put this into perspective, here are the results on Wikipedia for the same, when done from Wikipedia search. 

Wikipedia was not only able to realize the mistake in the name but also provided the result that most would look for.  

Opinion: Grokipedia currently misses the features that were available in chatbots or search engines years ago. This could be attributed to the high dependence of Grokipedia on the AI chatbot Grok, to take care of the natural language issues. But the chatbot as a whole seems to be amiss here. 

Final Verdict

One of the core motivations behind Grokipedia was democratizing viewpoints or information. But this should be for things that are debatable or polarizing. A query like a celebrity lookup online doesn’t have to be this convoluted. Also, Grok wasn’t used at any step of this process, other than doing the lookup (maybe). The information was limited to just one source, and that too from X. In its current state, Grokipedia seems like a redirect for the X’s explore tab, rather than a Wikipedia alternative.  

So What is there?

Right now, Grokipedia is basically a wiki-shaped container. It’s a front-end wrapper over the explore functionality of X. No other information sources are present. The only live thing is the X search integration. 

What Went Wrong (or Right)?

Here’s the twist: this might actually be intentional. According to Musk’s posts on X, Grokipedia is still in early beta. The plan is to let Grok ingest massive amounts of data from Wikipedia, academic sources, and real-time web content, then rewrite it with “synthetic corrections.” That process takes time, and it looks like they’re still in the ingestion phase. 

So yeah, the site is live, but none of its functionalities are present. I am still waiting for the AI to move in and start decorating the information. 

Can It Beat Wikipedia?

Wikipedia’s biggest strength isn’t just its content—it’s its community. Millions of volunteers, nerds, professors, trolls, and 13-year-olds have spent years building that thing. Grokipedia is trying to replace all of that with one AI. That’s bananas.  

The upside? No edit wars. No vandalism. No “citation needed” tags from 2009. 
The downside? No transparency. No human oversight. You are overwhelmed with a plethora of information sources, and you have to form your opinion on it yourself. You can rely on Grok to do that for you, but this has a caveat: Grok has been specially trained on X posts. So, if the AI thinks a meme is fact, we might end up with articles like “Birds Aren’t Real: A Scientific Summary.” 

Should You Care?

Right now, Grokipedia is a shell of its future self. It’s not useless, but it’s not useful yet. If you go there expecting to learn something, you’ll leave hungry. It’s in no shape or form replacing Wikipedia anytime soon. But if you’re curious about what comes next: about whether AI can actually build a better encyclopedia, then yeah, it’s worth bookmarking. 

An updated version of Grokipedia has been released, that is a major improvement over the one covered in this article. You can read about this more here Grokipedia v0.1

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