Billionaire owner of Space X and CEO of social media app, Elon Musk, has announced the release of his ChatGPT-like AI chatbot christened Grok.
Musk, in a blog post on his X handle described Grok as “the best that currently exists in some important respects.” He said the AI model will leverage real-time access to information on X, and like ChatGPT, Grok will have internet browsing capabilities which will enable it search the internet for updated information about specific topics.
Once out of beta testing, Musk said the xAI’s Grok system will be available to all X Premium+ subscribers.
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1720645900471554146?s=20
Musk’s AI version, according to him, answers questions conversationally and is designed to have a little humour in its responses. The Tesla CEO said Grok would be made available to premium subscribers on his X platform after testing. He also revealed that the AI had access to user posts on X and has a penchant for sarcastic responses.
Grok is a verb coined by American science fiction writer Robert A Heinlein and according to the Collins dictionary means to “understand thoroughly and intuitively”. The model is built by Musk’s new AI company, xAI. Staff at xAI in a blogpost on Saturday explained the chatbot’s debt to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a cult sci-fi comedy by British author Douglas Adams. The team said Grok was powered by a large language model – the fundamental technology behind AI chatbots – called Grok-1.
According to the blogpost, Grok-1 had surpassed GPT-3.5, the model used in the freely available version of ChatGPT but lagged behind the most powerful ChatGPT model, GPT-4.
Meanwhile, Musk, who was one of the early investors in OpenAI before he pulled out, had renewed his call for regulations on artificial intelligence (AI) during the recently concluded two-day UK AI Safety Summit. He expressed fears about the pace of development at companies like OpenAI and though in March he supported a call for a six-month pause in developing powerful systems, in July he said it no longer seemed realistic and announced the formation of xAI, which he said would build AI systems in what he described as “a good way”.
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