Elon Musk launches “Grok,” a new AI chatbot, in an attempt to take on ChatGPT

Elon Musk’s startup for artificial intelligence With a sassy chatbot that is intimately connected with X, previously Twitter, the tech mogul hopes to take on OpenAI, Google, and Meta. xAI has published its first AI model.

In a post on Saturday night, Musk said that Grok, the new AI system, has “real time access” to data from X, the social media platform he purchased for $44 billion (€41 billion) a year ago. This gives it a “massive advantage over other models,” which have mostly depended on older internet data archives.

Musk went on to say that the chatbot “loves sarcasm” and responds with “a little humour.” By giving Grok more personality, he wants to make it stand out in an increasingly crowded market.

A “very early” testing version of Grok was unveiled by xAI, along with the statement, “It will also answer spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems.”

This year, investors have poured billions of dollars into the so-called generative AI space, which produces human-like writing, code, and imagery in seconds. Proponents of this industry believe it has the potential to be just as revolutionary as the internet. Some, on the other hand, fear that a new tech bubble is inflating because the technology is still only beginning to be commercialised.

With what it claims to be only two months of training, XAI was able to produce a functional model, showing how new competitors are starting to chip away at the significant lead held by OpenAI, which unveiled its ground-breaking chatbot ChatGPT about a year ago.

Musk founded xAI earlier this year and stated last week that “AI will be able to do everything” someday, making human labour unnecessary. His group of engineers, who previously held positions at Microsoft and Google DeepMind, has been attempting to overtake more established competitors like OpenAI, which Musk cofounded in 2015 but departed three years later.

Despite having just been developed for a few months, Musk claims that benchmark tests show that Grok’s capabilities are on par with the most recent models from Meta—which debuted its LLaMA 2 model in July—and Inflection, the AI start-up founded by Mustafa Suleyman, a former co-founder of DeepMind.

According to xAI, Grok’s ability to answer mathematical queries and exhibit reasoning is comparable to that of OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 model, which was the basis for ChatGPT’s first release in November of last year. The startup also revealed that Grok, who matched Anthropic’s Claude model, received a C in his final maths exam in Hungarian high school.

Nevertheless, xAI admitted that it is not as good as OpenAI, which unveiled its most recent GPT-4 model in March. This model has demonstrated “human-level performance” on professional benchmarks like the US bar exam and is already being integrated by partner companies into apps.

[Grok] is only surpassed by models that were trained with a significantly larger amount of training data and compute resources like GPT-4, according to xAI. “This showcases the rapid progress we are making at xAI in training LLMs with exceptional efficiency.”

In September, Musk ally Larry Ellison’s software business, Oracle, said that xAI was using its cloud computing platform to train its technology.

Grok will be made available to users of X who apply now to test it out. After an undisclosed amount of testing, Grok will be priced at about $16 per month and available to customers of the app’s new “Premium+” service. – The Financial Times Ltd. all rights reserved. 2023.