Elon Musk’s xAI Unveils Grok: The Chatbot with a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Twist

According to a report, Elon Musk’s xAI recently unveiled a new chatbot named Grok. Grok is described as “AI inspired by the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” with the purpose of providing answers to questions and offering suggestions on what to inquire about, as per a blog post from xAI.

Musk hinted in his social media posts that Grok is designed to provide responses with a touch of humor and possesses a rebellious attitude, so it’s recommended for users who appreciate humor.

The post also emphasized Grok‘s real-time knowledge, which draws from X, enabling it to tackle unconventional queries that other AI systems may decline. However, the announcement doesn’t clarify how the chatbot verifies the accuracy of information obtained from X, considering the platform’s history of misinformation, which has exacerbated since Musk’s involvement.

Grok is powered by Grok-1, an advanced large language model (LLM) developed by xAI over the past four months. Grok itself has been trained for only two months, but the xAI team expects it to enhance its capabilities rapidly.

The main objective of this product, according to the blog post, is to facilitate research and innovation. The team intends to gather feedback from users to ensure they are creating AI tools that are of maximum benefit to humanity.

Despite its relatively brief training period, the company claims that Grok-1 has outperformed GPT-3.5 in certain benchmarks, including solving middle school math problems, though it still falls behind GPT-4.

Access to the chatbot is currently restricted to a select group of users in the United States, and Musk indicated that it will be available exclusively to subscribers of X’s new Premium+ plan, priced at $16 per month. A waitlist is also available for verified X users interested in trying out the chatbot.