Elon Musk unveils new sarcasm-loving AI chatbot for premium X subscribers

‘Grok is still a very early beta product – the best we could do with 2 months of training’

Elon Musk unveiled a new AI chatbot with “real-time knowledge” and a love for sarcasm.

The Tesla and SpaceX chief said the new chatbot called Grok has “a massive advantage” over other models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

“A unique and fundamental advantage of Grok is that it has real-time knowledge of the world via the X platform,” the company said in a blog post.

“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 name Grok seems to be inspired by Robert Heinlein’s 1961 sci-fi novel Stranger in a Strange Land, and means understanding something thoroughly and intuitively.

“As soon as it’s out of early beta, xAI’s Grok system will be available to all X Premium+ subscribers,” the Tesla titan said.

X, formerly Twitter, had launched its new premium+ plan last week for $16 per month, with subscribers getting special benefits like no ads.

The chatbot is expected to initially become available for a limited number of users in the US who can try out the AI system’s prototype and provide feedback to help improve its capabilities before wider release.

“Grok is still a very early beta product – the best we could do with 2 months of training – so expect it to improve rapidly with each passing week with your help,” X said.

It was revealed earlier this year that Mr Musk was secretly hiring AI experts to build a rival to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which gained prominence immediately after its launch last year for its uncanny ability to respond to users with human-like language.

The chatbot, and some of their rivals including those by Microsoft and Google, have since demonstrated they can achieve a number of major feats in a short time span.

These include the ability to summarise research studies and even crack competitive exams.

This soon led to fierce competition among tech companies to launch their own AI chatbot versions.

The Tesla and SpaceX boss has openly criticised OpenAI’s model on which ChatGPT runs for being overly politically correct.

In February, Mr Musk had hired AI researcher Igor Babuschkin, who specialises in developing machine-learning models powering chatbots like ChatGPT.

Later in April, it emerged that the multi-billionaire invested in 10,000 graphics processing units (GPUs) reportedly for a project involving a large language model.