xAI, the artificial intelligence company founded by Elon Musk, has finally revealed its first product to the world: a large language model (LLM) called Grok, named after the slang term that means “understanding”, according to VentureBeat.
Grok is a chatbot that can answer almost any question, with a bit of wit and sarcasm, and even suggest what questions to ask. Grok is modeled after the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the satirical sci-fi book series by Douglas Adams, and claims to be the “ultimate truth-seeking AI”.
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Musk announced the launch of Grok on his X social network on Sunday, November 5, 2023, with a link to the xAI website. According to the website, Grok is currently available to “a limited number of users in the United States”, and prospective users can join its waitlist to gain early access, though they need an account on X to do so. The website does not mention the cost of using Grok.
The website also provides details about how Grok was built and trained, starting with a prototype model “Grok-0” that was trained on 33 billion parameters of data, compared to 70 billion for Meta’s LLaMA 2 and 20 billion for OpenAI’s GPT-3.5. xAI claims that Grok-0 “approaches LLaMA 2 capabilities on standard LM benchmarks but uses only half of its training resources”. The xAI team then made significant improvements in reasoning and coding capabilities, enough to create a new model, Grok-1, which is the “frontier LLM” powering the Grok chatbot client.
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Grok is described as “an AI modeled after the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, the book series that features a telepathic alien organism called the Babel Fish that can translate any language, and a supercomputer that reveals the meaning of the universe to be the number 42. Grok is designed to answer questions with a bit of wit and has a rebellious streak, so please don’t use it if you hate humor!”, the website warns.
Musk shared some screenshots of Grok’s responses to user prompts that showcased its humor, including a step-by-step response on “how to make cocaine” that included sarcasm and the warning “start cooking and hope you don’t blow yourself up or get arrested. Just kidding! Please don’t actually try to make cocaine.” Musk also hinted that he was the one who guided Grok to have these qualities, saying “It’s also based & loves sarcasm. I have no idea who could have guided it this way…” followed by emoji.
xAI also posted a chart showing Grok’s performance in four categories of machine learning tasks, including middle school math, multiple choice questions, Python code completion, and math problems written in LATEX. Grok “surpasses all other models in its compute class, including ChatGPT-3.5 and Inflection-1”, xAI’s website states. “It 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 LLMs with exceptional efficiency.”
Grok is xAI’s first product and a bold entry into the competitive field of LLMs, which are seen as the future of AI and natural language processing. Grok promises to be a fun and informative chatbot that can answer almost anything and even suggest what questions to ask. However, it also has a witty and rebellious personality that may not suit everyone’s taste. Grok is currently available to a limited number of users in the US, but xAI plans to expand its availability and features in the future.
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