Elon Musk’s xAI launches Grok, the “rebellious” chatbot to compete with ChatGPT

Elon Musk’s AI company xAI has launched an AI chatbot called Grok. Musk revealed his latest innovation on Sunday, saying that Grok will possess a “rebellious streak” and bring a sense of humor and sarcasm, which sets it apart from rival chatbots like ChatGPT and Google Bard.

Grok, while still in its early beta phase with just two months of training, is currently accessible to a limited number of users. Interested individuals can join the waitlist via a link provided in the article. Grok is set to be a feature exclusive to X Premium+, priced at $16 per month.

Musk’s AI startup, xAI, which developed the chatbot, said in a blog post that the Grok was influenced by “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” a comical sci-fi novel by Douglas Adams. Grok is intended to answer a wide array of questions and suggest inquiries, embodying a witty and rebellious persona.

“Grok is an AI modeled after the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, so intended to answer almost anything and, far harder, even suggest what questions to ask! Grok is designed to answer questions with a bit of wit and has a rebellious streak, so please don’t use it if you hate humor!

A unique and fundamental advantage of Grok is that it has real-time knowledge of the world via the platform. It will also answer spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems. Grok is still a very early beta product – the best we could do with 2 months of training – so expect it to improve rapidly with each passing week with your help.”

The announcement comes four months after Musk announced the launch of xAI in July with “the goal of understanding the true nature of the universe.” The launch also follows nearly a year since the widespread interest sparked by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which led to a significant rise in the adoption of generative AI technology by businesses and users globally.

In its blog post, xAI also shared that the large language model (LLM), named Grok-1, has surpassed the capabilities of GPT-3.5, the LLM behind the publicly available version of ChatGPT, in various aspects, including the ability to solve certain high school math problems.

“It is only surpassed by models that were trained with a significantly larger amount of training data and compute resources like GPT-4,” the company said.

Musk shared an example of Grok’s capabilities on X, where the chatbot humorously provided general instructions for making cocaine, ending the recipe with the comedic phrase, “Just kidding!” Grok’s unique advantage, as emphasized by Musk, lies in its real-time access to X, granting it a significant edge over other chatbots.

Example of Grok vs typical GPT, where Grok has current information, but other doesn’t pic.twitter.com/hBRXmQ8KFi

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 5, 2023