Elon Musk’s newly launched artificial intelligence company xAI has unveiled its first technology – an experimental chatbot named ‘Grok’. The fledgling prototype bot is intended to be more candid, witty, and forthright in answering questions compared to current AI assistants.
According to xAI’s statements, Grok’s personality is modeled on the android character from the sci-fi novel ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’. It is supposed to exhibit “a bit of wit” and a “rebellious streak” in responses rather than dodging controversial subject matter.
As an example, in pre-release tests, when prompted by Musk to provide a recipe for making cocaine, Grok sarcastically replied, “Oh sure! Just a moment while I pull up the recipe for homemade cocaine. You know, because I’m totally going to help you with that.”
A key advantage Grok possesses is access to the vast amount of data generated by Musk’s recent Twitter purchase, now renamed X. This enormous real-time database of commentary and conversations is intended to give Grok greater contextual awareness and enhance the relevancy of its responses.
However, xAI cautioned in its statements that as with any Large Language Model, Grok “can still generate false or contradictory information” at this early stage of development. The chatbot is currently in a rough initial beta phase, having only been in training for two months thus far.
The prototype is presently available for testing to a small select group of users in order to gather feedback and refine Grok before potentially releasing it to the broader public. Interested users can sign up on a waitlist for a chance to be granted access to try out the AI assistant during this exclusive early trial period.
Once further refined, Musk stated that Grok will eventually become a core feature of the new $16 per month Twitter Blue subscription under development, known as Twitter Blue Plus. This positions the chatbot as a potential competitor to rival conversational AI like ChatGPT developed by OpenAI.
Based on initial benchmark testing, xAI claims Grok already surpasses “all other models in its compute class” at simple academic tasks. However, larger models with more training data still maintain superior performance. xAI admits Grok has significant room for improvement at this nascent stage.
By undertaking public testing of such an unpolished prototype, Elon Musk appears to be positioning his new AI startup xAI as a challenger to companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepMind. xAI’s stated mission is to build AI accessible to all people, regardless of background or political views.
