Grok is the Elon Musk-backed AI offshoot of X that he’s hoping will compete with ChatGPT and Bard. Can it? Here’s what you need to know.
Grok! It might not roll off the tongue like ChatGPT or Windows Copilot, but it’s a large language model chatbot all the same. Developed by xAI, an offshoot of the programmers who stuck around after Elon Musk purchased X (formerly known as Twitter), Grok is designed to compete directly with OpenAI’s GPT-4 models, Google’s Bard, and a range of other public-facing chatbots.
Launched in November 2023, Grok is designed to be a chatbot with less of a filter than other AIs. It’s said to have a “bit of wit, and has a rebellious streak.”It’s only for X Premium users
Want to play around with Grok yourself? You can, if you’re an X Premium+ subscriber and also reside in the U.S. (r use a VPN). Even so, there’s a waiting list to try out the prototype, so there’s no guarantee you’ll get in.
While you might expect it to open up to a wider audience when it’s out of beta, Musk has suggested that Grok will remain a feature exclusive to Premium+ X subscribers for the foreseeable future.It’s a chatbot
Just weeks after discussing how dangerous Musk thought the recent advances in AI were, he launched Grok in beta form. Though he claimed that it would be more open in its communication style, with less of a topic filter, it’s ultimately a chatbot like any of the others.
That’s because it was built in much the same way. It’s a large language model AI, which means it was built using lots of training data, some from X, some from the web at large. We’re told its running on the Grok-1 large language model (LLM) with some 33 billion parameters. This would put it behind Meta’s LLaMa and OpenAI’s GPT-4, which have 70 billion and 1.
