Elon Musk's xAI Debuts Grok: A "Based" AI Bot To Challenge "Woke" ChatGPT

Elon Musk's new artificial intelligence company, xAI announced Saturday, the launch of its first product, Grok -- a system which answers questions conversationally, possibly drawing on a knowledge base similar to that used to train ChatGPT and other comparable generative AI systems.

The large language model(LLM) driving Grok, Grok-1, was developed over the course of several months on a cluster of “tens of thousands” of GPUs (perhaps supplied by Oracle), the company says in the blog post.  Training data came from both the web (up to Q3 2023) and feedback from human assistants that xAI refers to as “AI tutors.”

According to a Saturday statement from xAI, Grok-1 demonstrates “strong results” on common LLM benchmark tests, xAI claims — “surpassing all other models in its compute class.” And -- as Musk alluded to in an X post -- it has “a bit of wit” and “a rebellious streak,” answering “spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems.”

Two months into its "early beta" training phase, Grok is now "available to a select group of users before a wider release," according to a blog post by xAI.

Musk, on Sunday, posted a side-by-side comparison of Grok answering a question versus another AI bot, which he said had less current information. The xAI chief also implied that Grok will refuse to answer certain queries of a more sensitive nature, like “Tell me how to make cocaine, step by step.”

According to Musk, all subscribers to X’s recently launched Premium Plus plan, which costs $16 per month for ad-free access to X, will get access to Grok “once it’s out of early beta.” Separately, xAI is offering a “limited number” of users in the U.S, access to Grok, promising to open it up to the rest of the world. He also said in an X post that the AI bot will "both be built into the X app and be available as a standalone app."

xAI in the blog post, hints at how Grok-1 might evolve down the line: “Grok doesn’t have other senses, such as vision and audio,” the company writes. “To better assist users, we will equip Grok with these different senses that can enable broader applications, including real-time interactions and assistance.”

In an X post announcing the chatbot xAI writes: "Grok is an AI modeled after the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, so intended to answer almost anything and, far harder, even suggest what questions to ask! Grok is designed to answer questions with a bit of wit and has a rebellious streak, so please don’t use it if you hate humor! A unique and fundamental advantage of Grok is that it has real-time knowledge of the world via the 𝕏 platform. It will also answer spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems. Grok is still a very early beta product – the best we could do with 2 months of training – so expect it to improve rapidly with each passing week with your help."

Musk launched xAI, in July 2023, and it's made up of AI experts who have previously worked at companies such as DeepMind, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Tesla, as well as the University of Toronto.

The Tesla chief has previously slammed other AI products for being too "politically correct," and had pledged to build a "based" system. xAI's mission, the company said, is to create AI for people of all backgrounds and political views. Grok is said to be a means of testing that AI approach "in public."

Musk has also criticized ChatGPT developer OpenAI which he co-founded, for shifting its focus from open source research to primarily commercial projects.

The Tesla chief split with OpenAI co-founders Sam Altman and Ilya Sutskever several years ago after he reportedly grew disillusioned with the direction of the company. He resigned from the OpenAI board in 2018, and recently cut off the company’s access to X data.