The question of how the ancient Egyptians built the Great Pyramid of Giza remains unresolved. Recent attention has focused on an analysis of this question by Grok, an artificial intelligence system developed by Elon Musk’s company. The AI reviewed archaeological surveys, engineering reports, geological data, and academic studies on the pyramid. Its conclusion was not about lost alien technology or hidden treasure. Instead, it identified gaps between the official explanation of the pyramid’s construction and what the evidence actually demonstrates.

The Great Pyramid was built around 2560 BCE for Pharaoh Khufu, who took power in approximately 2589 BCE. It stands about 146 meters tall and contains roughly 2.3 million stone blocks. Some of these blocks weigh several tons, and a portion of them weigh up to 80 tons. The pyramid’s base covers 13 acres and is level to within about two centimeters across its entire surface. Its four sides align with the cardinal directions with an error of less than one degree.

Experts agree on these measurements. The debate centers on construction methods. The standard explanation taught in textbooks is that workers used ramps, sledges, copper tools, and water. Modern archaeology has established that the workforce was not made up of slaves but of organized, well-fed workers. Excavations in the 1990s revealed a settlement near the pyramid site with bakeries, breweries, medical facilities, and graves. These workers were divided into rotating teams with identifiable names.

Evidence for this workforce exists in the pyramid itself. In 1838, British explorer Richard Howard Vyse discovered marks in a chamber above the King’s Chamber. Workers had painted their team names in red ochre. One team called itself “Friends of Khufu.” The marks suggest the workers felt a sense of identity and pride in their work.

The unresolved engineering problems are considerable. The King’s Chamber contains nine granite beams weighing between 40 and 70 tons each. This granite came from Aswan, more than 800 kilometers south of Giza. How these massive stones traveled across the landscape and were raised about 43 meters into the structure is not fully explained. The same applies to the casing stones on the pyramid’s exterior, which fit together with gaps of roughly half a millimeter. Surveyor Flinders Petrie measured these joints in the late 19th century and found the stone faces were matched with extraordinary precision.

There is no agreement among scholars about how the blocks were raised to the upper levels. A straight ramp would need to be more than a kilometer long and would contain more material than the pyramid itself. No trace of such a ramp has been found. A spiral ramp wrapped around the exterior would have obscured the corners workers needed for alignment. In 2007, architect Jean-Pierre Houdin proposed an internal ramp hidden inside the structure. Gravity surveys have pointed to features consistent with this theory, but it has not been confirmed.

New technology has recently revealed that the pyramid still holds unknowns. In 2015, an international team began using muon tomography, a technique that detects subatomic particles to image the interior of solid objects. In 2017, this project found a void roughly 30 meters long above the Grand Gallery. In 2023, researchers confirmed a second, smaller corridor near the north face. Both discoveries were made in the most studied structure on Earth and were confirmed by multiple independent teams.

What the AI analysis highlighted was not a discovery but a pattern. Over time, confident claims about the pyramid have been corrected. The claim that slaves built the pyramid was disproven. The claim that no large internal spaces remained was proven wrong. In each case, the confidence level was higher than the evidence supported.

Some commentary has suggested the AI’s findings indicate the pyramid was built by non-human intelligence. The available evidence offers no basis for that conclusion. The more straightforward reading is that current knowledge of this achievement remains incomplete. The thousands of researchers who have studied the pyramid have not recovered the full sequence of techniques used to build it.

There are still many details about the ancient world that modern research has not fully recovered. In the case of the Great Pyramid, the structures themselves provide clear evidence of what was achieved. The methods, however, are not fully documented. As survey methods improve, the pyramid continues to reveal new information. The gaps between the existing explanations and the physical structure remain an open field of research.