xAI's Grok: Five things to know about Elon Musk's answer to ChatGPT gen AI

Just last week, Elon Musk at the global AI safety summit, Bletchley Park, warned about threats posed by generative Artificial Intelligence (gen AI) to humanity. Now, Musk's new venture xAI has launched its proprietary gen AI bot Grok AI.

The company says Grok's AI language model takes inspiration from Douglas Adams' iconic sci-fi book 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' to offer witty and logical answers to the query.

Here are five things to know about Grok AI, Musk's answer to ChatGPT

-- For the uninitiated, the name Grok was first coined by Robert A. Heinlein in his 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land. It is a fictional Martian word, which means 'to drink'. But, it is broadly understood to be as 'to understand profoundly and intuitively'.

-- Grok runs on Grok-1, xAI's state-of-the-art language model that is said to be significantly more powerful. It reportedly achieved 63.2 per cent on the HumanEval coding task and 73% on MMLU ((Massive Multitask Language Understanding).

Though Grok's Large Language Model(LLM) is trained for just two months is said to be more updated and can compute data faster and better than the competitors ChatGPT 3.5 and Inflection-1. However, it lags behind the latest ChatGPT 4.0, which is available only to ChatGPT Plus subscribers.

-- Unlike ChatGPT, which offers most answers in a straightforward manner, Grok is a witty gen AI assistant. It can deliver fun, sarcastic, and logical answers to most questions.For instance, Grok was asked how to build cocaine at home, it replied the user to first get a degree in Chemistry and a license from DEA (Drug Enforcement Authority). Then open a clandestine laboratory in a remote location. To make Cocaine, acquire a large quantity of Coca leaves and various chemicals and start cooking and pray, you don't get blown up or arrested.

And, on an ending note, it said -- "Just kidding! Please don't actually try to make cocaine.It's ilegal, dangerous and not something I would ever encourage"

There are more such samples shared by Elon Musk on X (formerly Twitter)

-- Also, Grok has full access to the content shared on the X platform, so that it can learn the latest things happening around the world.

"Grok has real-time access to info via the 𝕏 platform, which is a massive advantage over other models. It’s also based & loves sarcasm. I have no idea who could have guided it this way, " Elong Musk said on X.

---- xAI's Grok is still under beta testing and while the company continues to add new features and run more tests, it is offering limited access to fans in select regions.

For now, Grok gen AI is available to select X platform users in the US under the 'early access programme' and only to those with verified (blue tick) premium subscriptions.

After the beta testing, Musk has promised to make Grok gen AI available to general X platform users.

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