Elon Musk has launched Grok with his start-up xAI, an artificial intelligence tool that as the billionaire stated “has a rebellious streak” to compete with others like ChatGPT and Google’s Bard with a unique design intended “to answer questions with a bit of wit.”
The newly released model is to be integrated with X, formerly Twitter and has “real-time access” to information from X which Musk bought for $44bn a year ago.
The chatbot “loves sarcasm” and responds with “a little humour”, Musk added, this is in the hope that this extra personality gives Grok an edge in a quickly crowding market.
“It will also answer spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems,” xAI said as it announced a “very early” testing version of Grok.
The speed with which xAI’s released a capable model; just about two months of training shows how the early lead gained by OpenAL and the others just about a year ago is being eaten away by new players.
Only X subscribers can apply for now to try out Grok, which will be accessible to its new “Premium+” service, at the cost of about $16 a month, after it testing is complete, time has not been giving.
This AI Chatbot launch comes as Musk is working on boosting the former Twitter platform engagement and sales, which has been struggling with revenue in the last year after many advertisers left the social media platform.
Experts have had to warned that chatbots could potentially be prone to biases or spread harmful material or false information, known as “hallucinations”.
Even though they built so quickly, Musk has claimed that Grok’s abilities rival the latest models from Meta, which released its LLaMA 2 model in July, and Inflection, the AI start-up led by former DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman, according to benchmark tests.
The startup xAI claims that Grok’s response prowess in mathematical queries or reasoning is comparable to OpenAI’s GPT-3.5, the model that powered the initial version of ChatGPT. It also said that Grok passed a Hungarian high-school final maths exam with a grade C, matching Anthropic’s Claude model.
They however, xAI admitted it was behind OpenAI, which in March released its latest GPT-4 model. That has shown “human-level performance” on professional benchmarks such as the US bar exam, and is already being embedded into apps by partner companies.
