Elon Musk’s new chatbot rival, Grok, has officially launched as the xAI founder promised last week. This AI chatbot is positioned to be the “rebellious” sidekick that answers questions that its rivals won’t. Musk announced the xAI startup back in July, and its Grok chatbot is currently invite-only in the US. Still, Musk has committed to making the AI assistant available through the X Premium Plus subscription, with a monthly cost of $16 / £16 / AU$28 or an annual cost of $168 / £168 / AU$270.
Grok, similar to ChatGPT, is an LLM (large language model) designed to answer almost anything and function as your research assistant on various topics. According to Musk, Grok will be integrated into the X app and will also be available as a standalone app. It sets itself apart from ChatGPT through its focus on humor and its access to real-time knowledge of the world from X (formerly Twitter).
xAI claims that Grok’s early version was trained only four months ago using 33 billion parameters. While this is considerably less than the 170 trillion parameters used by OpenAI’s GPT-4, xAI maintains that Grok’s early AI model nearly approaches the capabilities of Meta’s LLM model on standard benchmarks.
Despite the controversies it may generate, Grok is positioned as an unruly sidekick that is set to shake up the AI chatbot space with its unique focus on humor and bold stance compared to its more conservative rivals. Musk has even contributed to this rebellious image by sharing Grok’s humorous responses that have already started making waves on social media.
In sum, Grok presents an exciting new addition to the chatbot landscape, bringing an unusual blend of humor and real-time world knowledge to users. Its full launch and the broader controversies it may spark are something to watch out for.
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