Elon Musk has introduced an AI chatbot named “Grok” that promises to bring humor and wit to the table, much like Musk’s own sarcastic sense of humor. Musk, who has been the owner of X, formerly known as Twitter, for a year, announced this AI chatbot over the weekend, revealing that Grok is being trained with “real-time access” to information from the platform.
Grok is the brainchild of Musk’s AI startup, xAI, and it draws inspiration from Douglas Adams’ comedy sci-fi novel “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” Musk shared that Grok “loves sarcasm,” which he humorously claimed not to know how it ended up that way. The AI chatbot is designed to answer questions with a witty and rebellious streak, making it a fun conversational partner.
While Grok is still in its early testing stage, it’s set to become available to subscribers of X’s Premium+ service, who pay $16 a month in the United States. XAI has high hopes for Grok’s potential, suggesting that as users interact with it, the chatbot’s abilities will evolve and expand, potentially causing some unease among critics of Musk’s influence on the platform since acquiring it in October.
The development of Grok is in direct competition with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which was released last November with much excitement. It’s noteworthy that Elon Musk co-founded OpenAI but stepped down as chairman five years ago, citing disagreements over the company’s direction.
xAI has also mentioned that Grok’s underlying large language model (LLM) has surpassed the capabilities of GPT-3.5, which powers the publicly available version of ChatGPT, in various aspects, such as solving complex math problems. However, Grok is still outperformed by models like GPT-4, which were trained with significantly more data and computational resources.
Musk’s introduction of Grok adds a new dimension to AI chatbots, offering humor and rebelliousness that sets it apart from the competition.