What is Grok?
Grok is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbot and research assistant developed by Elon Musk’s xAI. It is designed to respond to user’s text prompts with humor and sarcasm, inspired by the sci-fi comedy, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It is powered by xAI’s frontier large language model (LLM), Grok-1 and has access to real-time data taken from posts made on X (formerly known as Twitter). xAI notes that Grok is “intended to answer almost anything” and is “designed to answer questions with a bit of wit.” It aims to help users access information, process data, and discover new ideas. Grok will be available to X Premium+ subscribers for $16/month.
The key differentiator between Grok and other AI assistants like ChatGPT and Claude 2 is that it has access to real-time data taken from the social media platform X. Additionally, Grok’s emphasis on humor and wit sets it apart from other solutions, as it is “based & loves sarcasm.” In two months of development, Grok-1 has already performed well on AI benchmarks like Human Eval and MMLU, scoring 63.2% and 73%, respectively. It also achieved a C grade with 59% on the May 2023 Hungarian national high school math exam.
The research team behind Grok is composed of experienced AI researchers from organizations and institutions, such as OpenAI, DeepMind, Google Research, and the University of Toronto. They have contributed to a wide range of innovations in the space, including GPT-4, GPT-3.5, AlphaStar, AlphaCode, Inception, Minerva, the Adam optimizer, batch normalization, layer normalization, Transformer-XL, autoformalization, and batch size scaling.
As with any language model, Grok can be prompted or jailbroken to produce harmful, discriminatory, or illegal content. To prevent this, xAI has implemented a series of safety protocols to ensure that Grok only produces safe outputs. The team continues to monitor Grok’s performance and is committed to refining and improving its capabilities.