While companies like Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Meta continue to work on their own AI-powered chatbots, Elon Musk has also jumped ship and introduced a new AI chatbot under its X portfolio, called Grok. It has what the company claims a few advantages over its competitors such as ChatGPT, so here’s everything you would want to know about it.
What is Grok?
Grok is an AI chatbot modeled after the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The company claims that Grok is designed to answer almost any question and interestingly, even suggest what questions to ask. “Grok is designed to answer questions with a bit of wit and has a rebellious streak”, says the company.
The idea behind Grok is to make it a powerful research assistant for anyone, helping them to quickly access relevant information, process data, and come up with new ideas. Grok is based on a custom training and inference stack built by X, that is based on Kubernetes, Rust, and JAX.
Not only that, but Grok is being prepared for the next jump in model capabilities, which will require reliably coordinating training runs on tens of thousands of accelerators, running internet-scale data pipelines, and building new kinds of capabilities and tools integrated within the chatbot.
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How is Grok different from ChatGPT or Bard?
X claims that Grok has a few advantages over its competitors including ChatGPT and Bard, the major one being access to real-time information being shared on the X platform. Musk has already been working on the platform to solve the bots issue and has an aim to make it the most reliable and accurate platform for accessing information.
As a result, multiple measures are being taken towards the aim, such as the introduction of various tiers of the premium subscription. Completion of the aim could further make Grok more accurate.
Aside from that, X claims that Grok will also “answer spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems”. As of yet, we don’t know in what context the claim has been made, as we haven’t tested the chatbot yet. Next, Grok also has the ability to give a reply with wit and humour, something the competitors cannot do. While that may not necessarily be an advantage, it surely is a distinctive feature.
In X’s own machine learning benchmarks, Grok surpassed all other models in its compute class, including ChatGPT-3.5 and Inflection-1. It was beaten by models that were trained with a significantly larger amount of training data and compute resources like GPT-4.
X is also paying enough attention to integrate safeguards so that Grok cannot be misused. “We believe that AI holds immense potential for contributing significant scientific and economic value to society, so we will work towards developing reliable safeguards against catastrophic forms of malicious use”, said the company.
Where is Grok available?
Grok is currently available in early access for a limited number of users who apply to join the program, particularly in the United States. Once you are out of the waitlist, you can provide feedback to the company. Waitlist can be joined only by premium subscribers of the X (formerly Twitter) subscription. There’s no word on when the early access program would expand to more countries.