Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI launched its first product, Grok, a generative AI chatbot. The chatbot will be accessible to all X (formerly Twitter) Premium+ subscribers according to Musk, after first stating that it would be available only to “select groups.”
Musk claims that Grok is “in some important respects…the best that currently exists”, aiming at big tech rival generative AI solutions like ChatGPT, Bard, Claude, and more.
xAI is Musk’s latest startup venture, launched in July 2023, and is trying to diversify the AI playing field amidst an increasingly competitive and (expensive) investment gold rush. Microsoft, Meta, Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic are rapidly increasing research, development, and investments across the wider industry to bolster AI portfolios and technologies.
It’s unknown at this time what xAI’s long-term AI ambitions are, but its first offering in Grok will provide access to X’s user posts and trending data.
What is xAI Grok?
Grok is a generative AI chatbot that is “designed to answer questions with humor” and “spiciness” according to the official xAI announcement and Musk.
In a demonstration of just how “spicy” its wit and responses can be, Musk reshared a question posed to Grok that would’ve been denied on any other major chatbot like ChatGPT or Bard unless you found a way to “jailbreak” it:
Grok is referred to as Grok-1 according to official documentation, and utilizes the company’s “frontier large language model which we developed over the past four months.” Grok has over 33 billion parameters, which approaches LLaMA 2 (70 billion parameters) capabilities. However, Grok uses only half of the training resources required by LLaMA 2.
To create Grok, xAI built a custom training and inference stack based on Kubernetes, Rust, and JAX. A full Grok-1 technical specification and model card is available on xAI’s website.
How do you get access to xAI Grok?
For now, access to Grok is restricted to “Premium+ subscribers of X” according to Musk. X is currently undergoing an overhaul in subscription plans, with “Basic”, “Premium”, and “Premium+” as the new membership tiers. Premium, which used to be Twitter Blue, is currently the minimum subscription level required to obtain a blue check mark.
Premium+ is available in the United States at $16 a month, or $168 a year. Premium starts at $8 a month, and Basic at $3 a month.
All interested X subscribers who want access to Grok should also register for the waitlist.
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