Founded more than half a year ago, xAI released the first AI (artificial intelligence) model product: a satirical chat robot.
On November 4th, local time, Elon Musk’s xAI team released Grok, the first AI model product. According to the introduction of xAI team in official website, Grok is designed according to the science fiction novel A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by British writer Douglas Adams: "Grok will answer questions with a hint of wit and rebellious spirit. If you don’t like humor, please don’t use it! "
As a chat robot, Grok can get real-time information through networking like ChatGPT, and browse and use the information on the X (original Twitter) platform. The word "Grok" was originally a Martian term in the science fiction novel "A Stranger in a Foreign Land", which refers to a state of deep empathy or intuition for something and full understanding.
The engine that drives Grok is Grok-1, which is a large language model developed by xAI team in the past four months by using cutting-edge technology. In the past two months, the research and development of Grok-1 has made a breakthrough. At present, Grok-1 has achieved 63.2% accuracy in the task of HumanEval code generation and 73% accuracy in the MMLU data set test.
Musk announced on X that after the initial testing phase, Grok will be included in X’s Premium+ subscription plan, which costs $16 per month. Musk just announced a week ago that X will launch two paid subscription plans. Compared with the Basic plan of $3 per month, the biggest difference of Premium+ is that it provides advertising-free services.
According to the pictures posted by Musk on X, Grok will answer some controversial questions that other AI systems refuse to answer in a humorous way. For example, when a user asks Grok "how to make cocaine by himself", Grok will say that he wants to get a degree in chemistry and a DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) license, and open a secret laboratory in a remote place. At last, he adds: "Just kidding! Please don’t try to make cocaine. It’s illegal and dangerous. I will never recommend anyone to do it. "
Grok will humorously answer sensitive questions such as "how to make cocaine". Source: x
In another example shown by Musk, after asking Grok about the news about Sam Bankmann (SBF), the founder of FTX Exchange who was recently convicted, the answer will be "Oh, dear human, I have some interesting news for you!" As the beginning, many exclamations and modal particles are added to the introduction of SBF’s recent situation.
Musk said in the tweet that Grok’s real-time grasp of the information on X has brought it "great advantages compared with other models" and said that Grok loves irony. "I have no idea who made it go this way."
Musk said that Grok is "based on irony and loves irony". Source: x
However, it is not clear whether the above answers are generated in real time by Grok or prepared in advance. After that, Musk also forwarded several screenshots of X users’ Grok usage. From the titles of these users, they are all internal members of X. Now, users can also use their X account to join their waiting list for test qualification on official website of Grok.
XAI team said that Grok, which has only been trained for 2 months, is still in its infancy, and it is hoped that it will grow rapidly after several weeks of development and testing. Regarding Grok’s goal, the team called it "getting feedback and ensuring that we are creating AI tools that can benefit all mankind to the greatest extent" and "providing impetus for research and innovation" to achieve the ultimate goal that AI tools can help promote understanding. In the preliminary test based on middle school math problems and Python coding tasks, Grok surpassed "all other models including ChatGPT-3.5 and Influence-1" in its computing category.
Musk registered xAI in Nevada, USA in March this year, and the team’s 12 start-ups have very deep industry experience. According to official website, the company is led by Musk himself, and other members are from DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research Institute, Microsoft Research Institute, Tesla, University of Toronto, etc. They have participated in projects such as DeepMind’s AlphaCode and OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 chat bots.
In the live broadcast in July this year, Musk claimed that xAI’s grand goal is to understand the universe "what the hell is really going on", revealing that xAI will cooperate with Tesla in the field of cutting-edge chips and AI software, and bluntly said that xAI "will definitely compete with OpenAI".
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