In July Elon Musk founded xAI with a website and a mission statement. On Saturday it announced a product. Grok — the word is from Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land and means to understand something completely — is a chatbot that will be offered inside X, first to a small group of American testers and then to subscribers of a new Premium+ tier at $16 a month, the top of the three paid plans Musk introduced last month.
What xAI says it is
Three claims. First, real-time knowledge: Grok reads X as it happens, so a question about this morning’s news gets this morning’s answer, where ChatGPT’s knowledge stops at its training cutoff — and it also searches the web. Second, personality: it is “designed to answer questions with a bit of wit”, has “a rebellious streak”, and will take on the “spicy” questions that other chatbots decline. Musk’s example was a step-by-step recipe for cocaine, which Grok answered with a joke and a refusal — the point being the tone, not the chemistry. Third, competence: xAI says the model behind it, Grok-1, was trained in two months, has 33 billion parameters, and beats GPT-3.5 and Meta’s Llama 2 on standard benchmarks while trailing GPT-4 — a fair and, for two months’ work, remarkable position.
What it is not
Not available outside the United States, not free, and not yet independently tested; every number above is xAI’s. It is also not the first “uncensored” chatbot, only the first with a distribution channel of half a billion users. Where it will actually differ from ChatGPT is not the wit but the data: Grok is the only frontier model with licensed, live access to X’s posts, the corpus that Musk closed to everyone else when he ended free API access this year. A chatbot that knows what people are saying right now is a genuinely new thing, and a chatbot that treats X as the truth about what people are saying is a genuinely worrying one.
The company
xAI is led by Musk with a founding team from DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research and Tesla, and advised by Dan Hendrycks of the Center for AI Safety. It is legally separate from X but, as Grok shows, built to feed it.
From Bangladesh
X is small here and Premium+ smaller; Grok will be a curiosity in Dhaka for a year at least. Its Bangla, based on what X’s Bangla corpus looks like, will be an interesting experiment in learning a language from its angriest speakers. The thing to watch is the tier: Musk has said Grok will be a reason to pay for X, and the price of a chatbot that lives in a social app is the price of the app.
Source: TechCrunch, via Prothom Alo.
