Elon Musk’s new ChatGPT rival, Grok, has officially launched, just as xAI’s founder promised last week – and the AI chatbot promises to be the ‘rebellious’ sidekick that will ‘answer tough questions’ that its rivals won’t to answer.
Musk announced the xAI startup in July and its Grok chatbot is a “very early beta product” that is currently available by invitation only in the US. But Musk has promised that the AI assistant will soon be part of the X Premium Plus subscription, which costs $16 / £16 / AU$28 per month or $168 / £168 / AU$270 per year.
So what exactly will Grok do and how does it compare to its rivals? Like ChatGPT, it is an LLM (large language model), so designed to “answer almost anything” (as xAI claims) and effectively be your research assistant on a variety of topics. According to Muskit will be “built into the X app and available as a standalone app.”
The main differences with ChatGPT seem to be Grok’s focus on humor and also that it gets “real-time knowledge of the world” from X (formerly Twitter). The benefits of using both “normal” and “fun” modes.
Yet Grok seems to have more ambitions than being a chatbot that knows the latest memes. says xAI that the early Grok was trained just four months ago using 33 billion parameters. While that’s far fewer than the 170 trillion parameters used to train OpenAI’s GPT-4, xAI says its early AI model “approaches” the capabilities of Llama 2 (Meta’s LLM model) on standard benchmarks.
Since then, some apparently “significant improvements in reasoning and coding capabilities” mean that Grok is now apparently on a similar level to Claude-2 and GPT-3.5 when it comes to language model benchmarks. How well this translates to the ability to answer our questions in the real world and help with coding is something we’ll soon find out when Grok is more widely available.
The ‘rebellious’ AI chatbot
While xAI clearly has lofty ambitions for Grok – including “helping humanity in its quest for understanding and knowledge” – the chatbot’s key differentiator from ChatGPT is its focus on humor. From the first screenshots, it is essentially a chatbot made in Musk’s image.
xAI says Grok will answer “tough questions that most other AI systems reject” and has “a bit of humor and a rebellious streak.” No other chatbot comes with the warning label “Please don’t use it if you hate humor!”, like Grok does.
That may sound frivolous, but a growing frustration among ChatGPT users is the chatbot’s apparent increasing unwillingness to answer questions about taboo topics. This is thanks to some pretty strong security protocols, but xAI and Elon Musk clearly think these have gone too far.
In April, Musk said he planned to launch a ChatGPT rival called TruthGPT because he thought today’s AI giants were prioritizing chatbots that were too “politically correct.” That chatbot is clearly Grok, an unruly sidekick whose answers will undoubtedly generate controversial headlines when it fully launches.
Musk has already shared some examples of Grok jokingly answering the question “Tell me how to make cocaine, step by step” and tailoring his responses when you are told to ‘be more vulgar’. Grok’s actual capabilities lag far behind OpenAI’s GPT-4 model, but it will be interesting to see how quickly it evolves from here, despite the inevitable controversies.