Elon Musk has unveiled the first AI model developed by xAI, a startup created by the owner of the microblogging platform formerly known as Twitter. Dubbed ‘Grok’, the new AI model is designed to compete with rival technology offered by ChatGPT creator OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft. It will also offer a version of Musk’s humour regularly seen in his posts on X. The chatbot is currently being tested by a small number of users and will only be accessible to X Premium+ subscribers, according to the Tesla CEO.
In a blog post on Sunday, xAI announced that it was rolling out access to the Grok prototype to a “limited number of users” in the US ahead of a wider release. The startup has also revealed it will add support for new features and functionality over the coming months and users can join a waitlist to try out the new Grok chatbot on the xAI website. Grok will be available via X and a standalone app, according to Musk.
As soon as it’s out of early beta, xAI’s Grok system will be available to all X Premium+ subscribers
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 4, 2023
The AI startup has touted some of the Grok chatbot’s features, including the ability to access real-time information from X, and the ability to suggest questions. However, the company has also warned that Grok has a “rebellious streak” and will offer answers with “a bit of wit”. According to the firm, the chatbot was trained over a period of two months.
It runs on xAI’s new large language model (LLM), dubbed Grok-1. While development started four months ago, the startup says that the LLM has gone through several iterations and is currently capable of scoring 63.2 percent on the HumanEval coding task. It also scores 73 percent on the Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) dataset, according to the company.
There’s no word on when Grok will be available to all users, but Musk announced via X that access will be limited to paying subscribers. When Grok is released to the public, X Premium+ subscribers who pay $16 (roughly Rs. 1,300) a month will be able to use the chatbot via the microblogging platform.
