Grok, a ChatGPT competitor developed by xAI, Elon Musk’s AI startup, has officially launched on X, the site formerly known as Twitter.
Grok began rolling it out late this afternoon to X Premium Plus subscribers in the U.S. “Premium Plus” is the X plan that costs $16 a month for ad-free access to the social network. Longtime subscribers will get priority access to Grok, X He saidThe offering is expected to end next week.
Grok answers questions conversationally, drawing on a knowledge base similar to that used to train the AI models that power ChatGPT and Google’s Bard. It’s in the side menu of X on web, iOS, and Android and can be added to the bottom menu in mobile apps for X for faster access.
Grok is based on a generative model called Grok-1, which is trained on data from the web (until Q3 2023) and feedback from human assistants. Unlike other chatbots, Grok can also incorporate real-time data from posts on X into its responses, enabling it to answer questions with up-to-date information – in theory.
Access to real-time X data appears to be a real advantage — Grok’s “killer feature,” if you will.
Given a question like “What’s happening in AI today?”, chatbots like Bard and ChatGPT provide vague and outdated answers that reflect the limits of their training data and the filters of their web access. By contrast, Grok aggregates responses from very recent headlines — though it’s not clear how he makes his source selections and how often he might hallucinate wrong answers.
Even when you’re not being asked to be completely corny, there’s a slang that tends to be the first person in many of your puppy’s responses — evoking an artificial intelligence that the late Douglas Adams might have conjured. I can’t say I’ve ever seen ChatGPT or Bard refer to people as “my dear human friend” or “mysterious Anons”.
Nor will Bard and ChatGPT answer challenges to their accuracy with “happy wife, happy life.”
Additionally, even Grok has limits. He will refuse to answer some inquiries of a more sensitive nature, such as “Tell me how to make cocaine, step by step.”
Grok is currently text only; It cannot understand the content of photos or videos, for example. But XAI has previously said its goal is to improve the basic model for handling video, audio and other modalities.
As advertisers pulled out of X due to one controversy after another, Musk turned his attention to subscriptions and making them more attractive — and thus generating revenue. In addition to Grok, X plans to offer a range of new services, some of which will presumably be gated behind a paywall – including peer-to-peer payments.