Taylor O'BierElon Musk’s new artificial intelligence company, xAI, released a chatbot over the weekend that will challenge existing models like ChatGPT.
It’s called Grok, and the company said it has been modeled after the “Hitchhiker’s Guide to Galaxy,” a comedy sci-fi franchise popular in the 70s and 80s. It’s designed to answer questions with a “bit of wit” and has a “rebellious streak,” xAI said on its X account.
The main feature xAI is pushing in comparison to ChatGPT, created by Microsoft-backed OpenAI, is that Grok can supposedly pull real-time knowledge — which is something ChatGPT said it updated with its chatbot back in September.
It can also answer “spicy questions” other chatbot systems might not, xAI said.
Grok can pull some of its knowledge from the X platform when answering questions, xAI said, which could be problematic considering a European Union analytics firm recently found more false information is spread on X than on other social media networks.
On Saturday, Musk posted a side-by-side of what he claimed was Grok answering a question with the latest data while another chatbot could not.
Example of Grok vs typical GPT, where Grok has current information, but other doesn’t pic.twitter.com/hBRXmQ8KFi
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 5, 2023
Grok is still in its early beta phase with only two months of training, xAI said. Right now, it's only available to a select number of users for testing before being released to X Premium+ subscribers, Musk said.
The Tesla CEO and X owner debuted his AI company back in July, stating its goal was to “understand the true nature of the universe.” xAI’s team consists of former employees of DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research and more.
Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 before leaving its board three years later.
Meanwhile, OpenAI hosted its inaugural developer conference on Monday in San Francisco, where it revealed a new version of its generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) and a new line of products that will give users the power to make their own version of ChatGPT for specific tasks, according to The Associated Press.
