If something comes from Elon Musk, it cannot be normal. Obviously, the genius founder of Tesla promises that everything he develops is groundbreaking. Even when it’s a chatbot, a business he enters years late.
Grok, Elon Musk’s new rival to ChatGPT, has officially launched as promised by the founder of xAI last week, and the AI chatbot promises to be the “rebellious” companion that will “answer spicy questions” that its rivals won’t answer.
Musk announced the creation of xAI in July, and its chatbot Grok is a “product in very early beta stage” that can only be accessed by invitation in the United States. But Musk has promised that the artificial intelligence assistant will soon be included in the X Premium Plus subscription, which costs $16 per month or $168 per year.
What will Grok do exactly, and how does it compare to its rivals?
Like ChatGPT, it is a Large Language Model (LLM), so it is designed to “respond to almost anything” and become your research assistant on a wide variety of topics. According to Musk, it will be “integrated into application X and available as a standalone application.”
The main differences with ChatGPT seem to be that Grok focuses on humor and also gains “real-time world knowledge” from Twitter. The advantages of using X as a source of information are highly questionable, but it appears that Grok will also have “normal” and “fun” modes.
However, Grok seems to have aspirations beyond being just a chatbot that knows the latest memes. xAI claims that Grok was trained only four months ago using 33 billion parameters. Although this number is much lower than the 170 trillion parameters used to train OpenAI’s GPT-4, xAI asserts that its initial AI model “approaches” Llama 2’s capabilities in standard benchmark tests.
According to estimates, Grok now appears to be at a similar level to Claude-2 and GPT-3.5 in terms of benchmark tests for language models. This is quite impressive considering they have just released it to the market.
We will soon find out to what extent this translates into its actual ability to answer our questions and assist us with coding when Grok becomes more widely available.
Although it is clear that xAI has grand ambitions for Grok, including “helping humanity in its quest for understanding and knowledge,” the main difference the chatbot has from ChatGPT is its humorous approach.
And from the early screenshots, it appears to be a chatbot crafted in Musk’s image. xAI states that Grok “will answer spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems” and has “a bit of wit and a rebellious streak.”
No other chatbot comes with the warning label “please do not use if you hate humor!” quite like Grok does.
