Elon Musk has ventured into the artificial intelligence sphere by introducing Grok, the inaugural AI system from his startup, xAI. The company is poised to rival industry leaders like OpenAI, Google, and Meta*.
Grok, a chatbot, has been integrated with the social media platform X, which Elon Musk acquired last year for $44 billion. It is described as being capable of appreciating sarcasm and delivering witty responses, features Musk believes will make it stand out in the competitive market.
A representative of xAI indicated that Grok has been programmed to tackle provocative questions that other AIs tend to sidestep. However, it is still in its preliminary test version, only two months into development.
The new chatbot will be offered to "Premium+" subscribers at approximately $16 per month following a test period, though the duration of this phase remains unspecified.
Grok's deployment is believed to pose a direct challenge to OpenAI's market position, especially given that its product, ChatGPT, has been leading since its release almost a year ago.
With the engagement rate plummeting on the X platform, Musk is aiming to retain users and boost sales. Since 2022 Twitter acquisition, the social network faced significant revenue losses due to advertisers pulling back over content moderation concerns. Meanwhile, Meta, a rival company, launched about 30 AI chatbots across its platforms in September. Some are designed to handle user queries, while others are programmed to mimic celebrities for entertainment purposes.
During the recent AI Summit in London, the tech CEO predicted that AI has the potential to replace human labor. Following this vision, he founded xAI this year, bringing on board former engineers from Google DeepMind and Microsoft. The company was established to compete with leading firms in the field, such as OpenAI, which he helped to found in 2015 before quitting three years later.
Musk states that the newly introduced chatbot, which was developed in a matter of months, shows performance comparable to the latest AI models from Meta and Inflection, as indicated by benchmark tests.
xAI acknowledged that although their Grok model demonstrates significant efficiency in training large language models, it remains behind OpenAI's GPT-4, which has achieved human-level performance, passing the US bar exam, and is being integrated into applications by partner companies.
“[Grok] is only surpassed by models that were trained with a significantly larger amount of training data and compute resources like GPT-4….This showcases the rapid progress we are making at xAI in training [large language models] with exceptional efficiency,” xAI acknowledged.
*Meta is banned in Russia for extremism.