By John Ikani
Elon Musk and his artificial intelligence (AI) startup xAI have introduced “Grok” – an AI chatbot that reportedly outperforms earlier versions of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in various assessments.
The objective behind developing Grok is to create AI tools that can support humanity by boosting research and innovation, as Musk and xAI explained in a November 5 X (formerly Twitter) post.
Musk and the xAI team say Grok possesses a “unique and fundamental advantage” which is real-time knowledge of the world through the X platform.
“It will also respond to provocative queries rejected by most other AI systems,” Musk and xAI stated. “Grok is meant to answer questions with a touch of humour and a rebellious streak, so don’t use it if you dislike humour!”
Just released Grokhttps://t.co/e8xQp5xInk
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 5, 2023
Grok is powered by the Grok-1 engine, which excelled in various academic tests in mathematics and coding, outperforming ChatGPT-3.5 in all exams, as per data shared by xAI.
However, Grok did not surpass OpenAI’s most advanced version, GPT-4, in any of the tests.
“It is only surpassed by models that were trained with significantly more training data and computational resources, like GPT-4, as noted by Musk and xAI. “This illustrates the rapid progress we are making at xAI in training LLMs with remarkable efficiency.”
Grok is set to be accessible on X Premium Plus, priced at $16 per month. Currently, it is only available to a limited number of users within the United States.
Grok is still considered a “very early beta product,” expected to see rapid improvements each week, according to xAI.
The xAI team has committed to implementing additional safety measures over time to ensure Grok is not used maliciously.
“We firmly believe in AI’s potential to provide significant scientific and economic value to society, so we are committed to developing robust safeguards against harmful applications.”
“We are determined to ensure that AI continues to be a positive force,” xAI added.
The release of Grok by the AI startup comes eight months after Musk established the company in March.
