With a snarky chatbot that is intimately connected with X, previously Twitter, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence start-up, xAI, has produced its first AI model. The tech tycoon hopes to take on OpenAI, Google, and Meta with this offering.
According to a post made by Elon Musk on Saturday night, Grok, the new AI system, has “real-time access” to data from X, the social media platform he purchased for $US44 billion ($67 billion) a year ago. This gives it a “massive advantage over other models,” which have primarily relied on older internet data archives.
Mr. Musk went on to say that the chatbot “loves sarcasm” and replies with “a little humour.” By giving Grok more personality, he hopes to make it stand out in an increasingly competitive industry.
A “very early” testing version of Grok was unveiled by xAI, along with the statement, “It will also answer spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems.”
In the current year, billions of dollars have been invested in the field known as “generative AI,” which creates writing, code, and images in seconds that resemble those of a human.
Proponents of this industry believe it has the potential to be just as revolutionary as the internet. Some, on the other hand, worry that a new tech bubble is forming and that technology commercialization is still in its early stages.
With what it claims to be just two months of training, xAI was able to produce a functional model, demonstrating how new competitors are starting to chip away at the sizable lead held by OpenAI, which debuted its ground-breaking chatbot ChatGPT about a year ago.
Grok is now accessible for trial by X users. After an undisclosed amount of testing, it will be made available to users of the app’s new “Premium+” service, which will cost about $US16 per month.
The rollout coincides with Mr. Musk’s efforts to increase sales and engagement at X, which has seen income decline since his 2022 acquisition of Twitter because of numerous advertisers withholding money due to worries over his laxing of content control policies.
Rival social networking platform Meta revealed in September that it was introducing about thirty AI chatbots across its Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp apps. Some of the chatbots are based on user queries, while others are modelled after celebrities’ personas and likenesses for amusement purposes.
