Meet Grok: Elon Musk’s AI chatbot coming to X with attitude and a sense of humor،
In July, Elon Musk announced that his new company, xAI, would develop a “AI seeking maximum truth“which is trying to understand the nature of the universe. Well, now the AI chatbot is official. Its name is Grok, and it’s inspired by The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and as the company says, it’s “intended to answer almost anything and, much more difficult, even to suggest questions to ask.”xAI official statement describes Grok as possessing “a little wit” And “a rebellious tendency,” which makes it suitable to respond to these “spicy questions” that other AI chatbots might avoid.
However, Musk hinted that Grok would refrain from answering specific sensitive questions, and ahead of publication, he posted an example on X, showing Grok humorously responding to a request for a cocaine recipe step by step.
xAI and Elon Musk highlight Grok’s unique advantage: real-time knowledge of the world via the X platform. Grok has “real-time access” to publications on X, as well as features already seen in ChatGPT or Google’s Bard, such as browsing the Internet to retrieve updated information on specific topics.
Currently, in early beta with just over 2 months of training, Grok is available for a limited number of users in the United States to test the prototype and provide feedback on further improvements before a wider version. Interested people can join the Grok waiting list.
Musk also announced that subscribers to X’s Premium Plus plan, which costs $16 per month for ad-free access to X, will have access to Grok once it leaves the first beta phase.
So how was Grok born?
The post explains that the driving force behind Grok is the large language model, Grok-1, developed over several months on a cluster of “dozens of thousands” GPUs (Graphics Processing Units). Training data comes from the web and feedback from human assistants called “AI tutors.” xAI claims that Grok is “outperforming all other models in its computing class“, probably referring to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard. In the blog post, xAI hints at the future evolution of Grok, stating that to better help users, Grok will be equipped with other senses, such as vision and audio, for broader applications and interactions in real time.
Funny enough (or at least in keeping with Musk’s sense of humor), Grok was introduced right after Elon Musk attended the first AI Security Summit, held in Bletchley Park, England, where he warned that AI was “one of the greatest threats to humanity.”
xAI, under the leadership of Musk and with experts from various fields, including veterans from DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, Tesla and the University of Toronto, is collaborating with X and other companies to drive the development of Grok.
