Billionaire Elon Musk has jumped into the AI bandwagon with the launch of Grok, touted as a rival of widely popular generative AI models like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Bard.
Elon Musk has said Grok will be made available to all X Premium+ subscribers as soon as it’s out of early beta. The Tesla CEO also revealed that Grok also has access to all user posts on X, a platform he bought in October 2022 after much controversy.
"xAI’s Grok system is designed to have a little humour in its responses. Grok has real-time access to info via the 𝕏 platform, which is a massive advantage over other models. It’s also based & loves sarcasm. I have no idea who could have guided it this way," Musk posted on X.
Grok is modelled after the famous science fiction book, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and can answer questions with a bit of wit and has a rebellious streak.
xAI says a unique and fundamental advantage of Grok is that it has real-time knowledge of the world via the 𝕏 platform. "It will also answer spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems."
On the need to build a generative AI model, xAI says the company wanted to create "AI tools that assist humanity in its quest for understanding and knowledge".
By creating and improving Grok, the company aims to ensure AI tools maximally benefit all of humanity. "It is important to design AI tools that are useful to people of all backgrounds and political views. We also want to empower our users with our AI tools, subject to the law. Our goal with Grok is to explore and demonstrate this approach in public."
xAI says with Grok, it also wants to empower research and innovation. "We want Grok to serve as a powerful research assistant for anyone, helping them to quickly access relevant information, process data, and come up with new ideas."
The engine powering Grok is Grok-1, xAI's frontier large language model (LLM), which it has developed over the last four months. "Grok-1 has gone through many iterations over this span of time."
After announcing xAI, the company trained a prototype LLM (Grok-0), with 33 billion parameters. "In the last two months, we have made significant improvements in reasoning and coding capabilities leading up to Grok-1, a state-of-the-art language model that is significantly more powerful, achieving 63.2% on the HumanEval coding task and 73% on MMLU."
The company is currently offering a limited number of users in the United States to try out the Grok prototype and give feedback.
Elon Musk has long been a proponent of the responsible use of AI. Speaking with UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak last week, he said AI could be far smarter than the smartest humans, which could pose the "biggest threats to humanity".
The Tesla CEO launched xAI in July 2023. The AI model focuses on research related to generative artificial intelligence. According to Musk, the goal of this new entity is to "understand reality."
