Elon Musk and his artificial intelligence (AI) startup xAI have released “Grok” — an AI chatbot that can supposedly outperform OpenAI’s first iteration of ChatGPT in several academic tests.
The motivation behind building Grok is to create AI tools equipped to assist humanity by empowering research and innovation, Musk and xAI explained in a Nov. 5 X (formerly Twitter) post.
Musk and the xAI team said a “unique and fundamental advantage” possessed by Grok is that it has real-time knowledge of the world via the X platform.
“It will also answer spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems,” Musk and xAI said. “Grok is designed to answer questions with a bit of wit and has a rebellious streak, so please don’t use it if you hate humor!”
According to the Cointelegraph the engine powering Grok — Grok-1 — was evaluated in several academic tests in mathematics and coding, performing better than ChatGPT-3.5 in all tests, according to data shared by xAI. However, it didn’t outperform OpenAI’s most advanced version, GPT-4, across any of the tests.
The AI startup noted that Grok will be accessible on X Premium Plus at $16 per month. But for now, it is only offered to a limited number of users in the United States.
Grok still remains a “very early beta product,” which should improve rapidly by the week, xAI noted. The xAI team said they will also implement more safety measures over time to ensure Grok isn’t used maliciously.
About xAI
xAI is a new company working on building artificial intelligence to accelerate human scientific discovery. We are guided by our mission to advance our collective understanding of the universe.
The Team: Our team is led by Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX.
We have previously worked at DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, Tesla, and the University of Toronto. Collectively we contributed some of the most widely used methods in the field, in particular the Adam optimizer, Batch Normalization, Layer Normalization, and the discovery of adversarial examples. We further introduced innovative techniques and analyses such as Transformer-XL, Autoformalization, the Memorizing Transformer, Batch Size Scaling, μTransfer, and SimCLR. We have worked on and led the development of some of the largest breakthroughs in the field including AlphaStar, AlphaCode, Inception, Minerva, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4.
Advisory: Our team is advised by Dan Hendrycks who currently serves as the director of the Center for AI Safety.
Relation to X Corp: We are a separate company from X Corp, but will work closely with X (Twitter), Tesla, and other companies to make progress towards our mission.
Source: xAI
According to the Financial Times Amazon, Microsoft and Google parent Alphabet look set to ramp up capital spending, as the world’s biggest cloud computing groups build up capacity to serve the growth of generative artificial intelligence. The Big Tech groups, which together dominate the global cloud market, have boosted investment in computing infrastructure over the past few years. Capital spending rose to a combined $42bn in the three months to September, almost 20 per cent more than the same period in 2021. That figure, which comprises reported corporate capex from Alphabet and Microsoft and Amazon’s businesswide investment in property and equipment, marked a 10 per cent rise from the quarter to June.
