Elon Musk's AI startup xAI launches its Grok AI chatbot for X platform Premium+ subscribers in the US.
Access to Grok is being rolled out to Premium+ subscribers in the US, the X company announced on its platform. Premium+ users will find Grok in the side menu on the web, iOS and Android platforms. The X Premium+ subscription starts at $16 per month.
Grok will be rolled out to all English-speaking X users in the coming days. A Japanese version and more languages will follow by early 2024.
"There will be many issues at first, but expect rapid improvement almost every day. Your feedback is much appreciated," writes Elon Musk.
Grok quotes and hallucinates
Grok's biggest USP is that it can give "spicy" answers, as a true rebel should - at least from xAI founder Elon Musk's perspective. The underlying model is technically on par with the free ChatGPT (GPT-3.5) or Gemini Pro and offers no innovations so far.
In the medium term, xAI and Grok plan to compete with OpenAI's ChatGPT. Musk claims that xAI's Grok has access to more up-to-date information than GPT models thanks to the X connection.
This claim is false because ChatGPT, Bard, and other chatbots like Perplexity.ai can also crawl the web for up-to-date information in real-time. If anything, they provide better coverage because they can access the entire web instead of just X.
X user Brian Roemmele shows in an example how Grok selects, aggregates, and links news stories on X based on his interests.
Video: Brian Roemmele via X
Ethan Mollick, a professor at the Wharton School and a specialist in LLM capabilities, shows that Grok can generate hallucinations based on X content and fails at simple text tasks.
Grok behaves like a GPT-3.5 model that is constantly joking around, Mollick says. "It is not a typical LLM, but typical LLM cautions apply."
xAI seeks and finds investors for anti-woke AI
Grok is also known as an "anti-woke" chatbot, designed to avoid the political correctness that's standard in other chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, and Google's Bard.
While Big Tech's AI models, and OpenAI in particular, can be classified as more center-left, Grok may be more conservative and right-wing. Studies will need to explore this question in the coming weeks.
Elon Musk has expressed concern in the past about the "wokeness" of AI, which could pose a danger to society and distort public opinion. So Grok also gives politically incorrect or vulgar answers.
xAI is currently seeking investments of up to one billion US dollars. According to a statement to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Musk has so far raised at least $134.7 million of this sum.
