Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI has unveiled its latest creation, “Grok,” an AI chatbot designed to outperform OpenAI’s first iteration of ChatGPT in academic tests. In a recent X (formerly Twitter) post, Musk and the xAI team expressed their motivation behind developing Grok – to create AI tools that can assist humanity in research and innovation.
Grok differentiates itself by having real-time knowledge of the world via the X platform, which Musk and xAI believe provides it with a “unique and fundamental advantage.” According to the team, Grok is not only capable of answering questions with wit but also possesses a rebellious streak, adding humor to its responses.
The performance of Grok-1, the engine powering Grok, was evaluated in several academic tests in mathematics and coding. Based on the shared data, it performed better than ChatGPT-3.5 in all tests. However, it did not surpass OpenAI’s most advanced version, GPT-4, in any of the tests. Musk and xAI attribute this to the larger amount of training data and compute resources used in training GPT-4.
Grok will be accessible on X Premium Plus for $16 per month, but initially only to a limited number of users in the United States. However, xAI assures that Grok is still a “very early beta product” that will continue to improve rapidly week by week.
In their effort to ensure responsible use of Grok, the xAI team plans to implement more safety measures over time. Their goal is to develop reliable safeguards against potential malicious use and ensure that AI remains a force for good.
The launch of Grok comes eight months after Musk founded xAI in March. Despite being a relatively new startup, xAI aims to make significant contributions to society through AI technology.
Overall, Grok represents another step forward in the field of AI and serves as a testament to the rapid progress being made by xAI in training LLMs (large language models) with exceptional efficiency.