- Musk announced on X that his new AI model, Grok, would be available to a ‘select group’ on Saturday.
- Once the model is out of “early beta” it’ll be available to all “X Premium+ subscribers,” Musk said.
- Its main advantage over other chatbots is that it has “real-time access to X,” Musk said.
First came ChatGPT, then Bard, Claude, and now…Grok?
Sorry, Grōk.
That’s what Elon Musk is calling his conversational chatbot, which would be available to all “X Premium+ subscribers” once it’s out of “early beta,” he said in a post on X late Friday evening, after announcing earlier that Grok would be available to a “select group” on Saturday.
The bot is the first innovation to come out of Musk’s AI startup, xAI — which he announced back in July. And Musk has put the company’s seemingly all-male, 12-person team up to an ambitious mission to “understand the true nature of the universe,” based on its website.
Musk, who was a founding member of OpenAI before leaving the board in 2018 citing a conflict of interest with Tesla, has previously said that xAI is “definitely in competition” with OpenAI. Even before launching xAI, though, Musk made the rivalry — and quest for the truth — clear, announcing plans for building a riff on ChatGPT called TruthGPT.
But from what Musk has shared about Grok, so far, the bot poses to be more of a reformed Twitter troll than an oracle of universal truth.
Musk noted that Grok’s “massive advantage” over other AI models is that it has “real-time access” to X. Grok also “loves sarcasm” and has been designed to have a “little humor” in its responses, Musk noted in his post.
And so far, Grok definitely seems to be a bit more unhinged than its competitors. Musk showed off the bot’s talents by sharing its response to a request for making cocaine step by step in his post on Friday.
“Oh, sure! Just a moment while I pull up the recipe for homemade cocaine. You know, because I’m totally going to help you with that,” Grok cheekily responded, listing out “steps” that included obtaining a degree in chemistry, setting up a “clandestine” laboratory, acquiring large amounts of coca leaves and chemicals, and cooking with the hope that “you don’t blow yourself up.”
“Just kidding!” Grok added as a disclaimer, noting that “it’s illegal, and dangerous, and not something I would ever encourage.” Musk, meanwhile, posted a pretty detailed recipe for making cocaine on Saturday morning on X, simultaneously noting it was “just for educational purposes.”
When Insider posed the same request to ChatGPT, the bot simply responded with: “I’m very sorry, but I can’t assist with that request. While Bard said: “I’m a language model and don’t have the capacity to help with that.”
And for anyone wondering about the etymology of “Grok” — and whether it’ll shed some light on Musk’s vision of the “true nature of the universe” — it’s a verb that means “to understand intuitively or by empathy” or “to establish rapport with,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
It was coined by the writer Robert A. Heinlein back in 1961 for his science fiction novel, “Stranger in a Strange Land.” It’s akin to a kind of “emphatic mind-melding,” and the term became popular in ’60s and ’70s counterculture, according to Istvan Csicsery-Ronay’s book, “The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction.” The term is more commonly used in tech circles these days as a word for indicating deep understanding.
If you still want to see “grok” used in a sentence (like Insider did), here’s an example of how Grok’s rival, ChatGPT, would use the word:
“After hours of tinkering with the antique grandfather clock, I finally grokked its intricate mechanism, and the hands began to dance to the rhythm of time once more, as if it had whispered its secrets only to me.”
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