Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI released its first AI Model. The tech billionaire is looking to take on OpenAI with a sassy, chatbot that’s tightly integrated with X formerly Twitter.
Musk said Grok has “real-time access” to the information on X, the social network platform Musk purchased for $44bn a few years ago. He made this statement in a blog posted on Saturday night. This gives it a huge advantage over models that rely on older internet data archives.
Musk said that Grok “loves humor” and will respond with “a bit of sarcasm”. He hopes to give Grok more personality in order for it to standout amongst a crowded market.
“It can also answer spicy questions which are not accepted by other AI systems,” xAI announced when it released a “very preliminary” version of Grok.
Investors have poured billions of dollars into so-called generative AI firms, whose technology creates humanlike text and code in seconds. The industry is said to be as revolutionary as the internet. Some, however, are concerned that a new bubble in technology is forming, since commercialisation of this technology is still at an early stage.
xAI ‘s ‘s ability to release an capable model after what they claim was only two months of training, shows how new entrants have begun to chip away at the massive lead established by OpenAI who released their breakthrough chatbot ChatGPT nearly a year ago.
Musk, who claimed last week that “AI would be able to perform everything” eventually, and make obsolete rendered human work, founded xAI in the first half of this year. His team, made up of former Google DeepMind, Microsoft and Microsoft engineers, is racing to catch-up with established rivals like OpenAI. Musk cofounded OpenAI in 2015, but left it three years later.
Musk says that despite being developed in only a few short months, Grok’s abilities are comparable to the latest models of Meta, who released their LLaMA 2 in July, as well as Inflection, a start-up AI led by Mustafa Suleyman (former co-founder of DeepMind).
xAI stated that Grok’s abilities to answer mathematical questions or demonstrate reasoning are similar to OpenAI GPT-3.5. This model was used to power the first version of ChatGPT, which launched in November last year. The start-up said Grok had passed a Hungarian final mathematics exam with a C grade, which is similar to Anthropic’s Claude models.
xAI admits that it is also behind OpenAI which released in March its latest GPT-4 Model, which showed “human-level performances” on professional benchmarks like the US bar examination and has already been embedded into apps.
“[Grok] was only surpassed in performance by models trained using a much larger amount of data and computing resources, like GPT-4,” xAI stated. This shows the rapid progress xAI is making in training LLMs at an exceptional rate.
Oracle, the software company headed by Musk ally Larry Ellison said in September that xAI is training its technology on its cloud computing platform.
After a period of testing, users of X will have the opportunity to apply to test Grok. This service is available for subscribers to “Premium+”, a new app that costs around $16 / month.