The first product from Elon Musk’s recently formed AI company, xAI, is Grok.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy served as the inspiration for Grok, according to the company. According to a statement released by xAI on Saturday, it is meant to have “a bit of wit, a rebellious streak and it should answer the “spicy questions” that other AI might dodge.
An example of Grok answering a request for a detailed cocaine recipe was shared by Musk on X, the former Twitter account, prior to the release.
“Oh sure!” Grok responded. “Just a moment while I pull up the recipe for homemade cocaine. You know, because I’m totally going to help you with that.”
Additionally, X also provides data to Grok, which xAI claims will give it an advantage. On Sunday, Musk shared a side-by-side comparison of an AI bot that he claimed had less up-to-date knowledge with Grok’s response to a query.
However, xAI clarified in its statement that Grok can still produce inaccurate or contradicting data, just like any Large Language Model, or LLM.
After just two months of training, the prototype is now in its early beta phase and can be tested by a small group of users before the company releases it to the general public. For a chance to use the bot, users can join a waitlist. Grok will eventually be a feature of X Premium+, which costs $16 a month, according to Musk on X.
The CEO of Space X and Tesla seems to be presenting xAI as a rival to businesses such as OpenAI, Inflection, and Anthropic.
The company claimed that Grok outperformed all other models in its compute class, including ChatGPT-3.5 and Inflection-1, on an initial round of tests consisting of middle school math problems and Python coding tasks. Larger data sets of bots performed better than it did.
It is the greatest that is available right now in a few key ways, according to Musk’s Friday X post that preceded the Grok announcement.
Robert A. Heinlein first used the term “grok” in his science fiction book “Stranger in a Strange Land,” published in 1961. “Grok” is a Martian term used in the book that has no exact translation into English. The precise meaning of the word has been disputed by critics, but they have ultimately agreed that it refers to a profound sense of intuition or empathy. Its simple definition as a transitive verb meaning “to understand profoundly and intuitively” is provided by Merriam-Webster.
With a team full of former workers from DeepMind, OpenAI, and other companies, xAI debuted in July. There are still multiple roles up for grabs.
Building artificial intelligence is the company’s declared mission, with the goal of expanding human knowledge of the cosmos. Musk has previously expressed his opinion that modern AI developers are leaning too much towards “politically correct” systems. Making AI accessible to people with diverse backgrounds and political philosophies is the stated goal of xAI.
Apparently, Grok is a way to publicly test that AI methodology.
