Elon Musk’s Humorous AI Chatbot, Grok, Is Here

Elon Musk and xAI has revealed their ChatGPT competitor, Grok. This new chatbot will have real-time knowledge of the world via Twitter updates, making it the most up-to-date conversational AI system available.

A unique and fundamental advantage of Grok is that it has real-time knowledge of the world via the 𝕏 platform. — xAI

What is Grok?

Grok is modeled after the inquisitive artificial intelligence from the sci-fi classic The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It aims to be a witty, humorous, and knowledgeable AI assistant that can engage in natural conversations on a wide range of topics.

In demonstrations shared on Twitter, Grok has shown it can understand humor and respond with its own jokes and amusing quips. This ability to banter playfully makes it more fun and engaging to chat with compared to other more robotic chatbots.

The backbone of Grok is Grok-1, xAI’s latest large language model. Grok-1 has 63.2 billion parameters, twice as many as GPT-3.5.

xAI’s researchers have achieved significant leaps in training efficiency, allowing Grok-1 to reach these advanced capability levels with less compute than comparable models.

In standardized tests of math word problems and multiple-choice questions, Grok-1 outperforms AI systems trained with similar resources like GPT-3.5 and Anthropic’s Claude.

It was trained on a massive dataset of internet text up to Q3 2023, as well as data provided by crowdsourced “AI Tutors”.

You can check out the Grok-1 model card here.

What makes Grok unique?

• Grok will have real-time knowledge of the world via Twitter updates
• Grok has more humor in its responses compared to other chatbots
• Multi-task and combine multiple chat windows
• Can handle up to 25,000 characters in the input window
• Grok is improving really fast. After two months of training, it has already surpassed GPT3.5 in the MMLU benchmark!
• Grok will answer spicy questions that are usually rejected by most other AI systems

Arguably Grok’s most groundbreaking capability is its real-time knowledge of current events and news via Twitter updates.

Grok is also said to be multi-modal (text, image, audio generation, and API coming soon).

How to access Grok

Currently, xAI is releasing Grok in a limited beta for US users only to gather feedback before a wider public release.

We are offering a limited number of users in the United States to try out our Grok prototype and provide valuable feedback that will help us improve its capabilities before a wider release.

You can join the waitlist to be notified when it expands to other countries.

Once out of early beta testing, Grok will be available to all X Premium+ subscribers for $16/month or $168/year.

Final Thoughts

As someone excited by the rapid innovations in conversational AI, I’m happy to see the release of this promising new chatbot competitor in an already bustling playground of AI assistants.

Grok is a serious competitor to ChatGPT. If the real-time knowledge via Twitter updates gets properly executed, it would make the other chatbots dumb.

So, what do you think of this LLM release from Elon and X? Was $44 billion for Twitter a steal? It will be exciting to see how this chatbot continues to evolve and whether it can live up to its ambitious goals.