Elon Musk’s Grokipedia is basically Wikipedia with a mustache

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Elon Musk’s latest brainchild, Grokipedia, is officially live, and let’s just say it looks suspiciously familiar. 

The site bills itself as a Wikipedia-style encyclopedia “fact-checked by Grok,” Musk’s in-house AI from xAI. In practice? 

It’s Wikipedia with a darker sense of humor, a few missing features, and some eyebrow-raising edits.

At first glance, Grokipedia feels like stepping into a stripped-down version of Wikipedia circa 2008: there’s a search bar, a bunch of text-heavy pages, and not a photo in sight. 

The design screams “student project,” though to be fair, it’s labeled version 0.1. 

Users can’t yet edit entries, a key part of what makes Wikipedia thrive, and even the mysterious “Edit” buttons that appear on a few pages don’t actually let you change anything. 

They just show past edits, minus any sign of who made them. Transparency, this is not.

Still, Musk had promised Grokipedia would be a “massive improvement” over Wikipedia. Except that many of its articles are literally copied from Wikipedia. 

The MacBook Air entry, for example, carries a line that sheepishly admits: “Content adapted from Wikipedia.” 

The same goes for the PlayStation 5 and even the Lincoln Mark VII, nearly word-for-word clones. 

As Lauren Dickinson from the Wikimedia Foundation quipped, “Even Grokipedia needs Wikipedia to exist.”

Not every page is a straight copy, though (some take creative liberties). 

Take climate change: while Wikipedia clearly states there’s an overwhelming scientific consensus that humans are warming the planet, Grokipedia’s version hedges, suggesting critics think talk of “near-unanimous consensus” is overblown and that groups like Greenpeace have “contributed to heightened public alarm.” Subtle, huh?

For now, Grokipedia claims around 885,000 articles, impressive, but still far from Wikipedia’s seven million in English alone. 

Musk says more features are coming, but for now, the “AI-verified encyclopedia” feels more like a remix than a revolution. 

It’s Wikipedia through a funhouse mirror, powered by Musk’s AI, sprinkled with controversy, and, apparently, still fact-checked by the internet’s favorite unpaid volunteers.