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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence start-up xAI has released its first AI model, as the tech billionaire aims to rival OpenAI, Google, and Meta with a witty chatbot integrated with X, formerly Twitter.
Grok, the innovative AI system, has real-time access to information from X, the social media platform Musk acquired for $44bn a year ago, according to a post Musk shared on Saturday night. This gives Grok a significant advantage over other models that rely on older internet data archives.
Musk hopes Grok’s personality, which includes a love for sarcasm and a touch of humor, will help it stand out in a highly competitive market. xAI, as they introduce an early testing version of Grok, also promises that it will answer spicy questions often rejected by other AI systems.
This year, generative AI companies, capable of creating humanlike text, code, and imagery in seconds, have attracted billions of dollars in investment. While some believe it has the potential to be as transformative as the internet, there are concerns about a possible tech bubble forming due to the early stage of commercialization.
xAI’s release of a capable model after just two months of training demonstrates how new players are closing the gap on OpenAI, who introduced their breakthrough chatbot ChatGPT nearly a year ago. Musk, who recently stated that AI will eventually replace human work, founded xAI earlier this year to compete with established rivals like OpenAI, which he co-founded in 2015 but left three years later.
In spite of its relatively short development time, Musk claims that Grok’s capabilities are comparable to the latest models from Meta, which launched its LLaMA 2 model in July, and Inflection, the AI start-up led by former DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman. xAI reveals that Grok demonstrates similar mathematical and reasoning abilities as OpenAI’s GPT-3.5, the model behind the initial version of ChatGPT, and performed well on benchmark tests.
However, xAI acknowledges that it is lagging behind OpenAI, who released their latest GPT-4 model in March. GPT-4 has demonstrated human-level performance on professional benchmarks and is already being integrated into apps by partner companies.
xAI has been training its technology using the cloud computing platform of Oracle, the software group chaired by Musk ally Larry Ellison, as announced in September.
X users can now apply to try out Grok. After completing an unspecified testing period, Grok will be available to subscribers of the app’s new “Premium+” service, priced at approximately $16 per month.
