Elon Musk Says His New AI Bot ‘Grok’ Will Have Sarcasm and Access to X Information
- Musk’s posts offered some of the first concrete indications of plans for xAI, the startup he unveiled in July with the mission, as stated on its website, to “understand the true nature of the universe.”
Elon Musk gave a glimpse of his artificial-intelligence startup’s first product: a bot named Grok whose sense of humor he demonstrated with jokes about Sam Bankman-Fried and how to make cocaine.
Musk, with a series of posts late Friday on X, included what he indicated were sample responses from Grok as he boasted that it will have a sarcastic sense of humor and the advantage of access to information via X, the platform formerly known as Twitter that he bought just over a year ago. He said Grok would begin limited testing on Saturday to a select group, and, after early beta testing, be made available to X’s Premium+ subscribers.
xAI was planning to release more information about the test of Grok later Saturday, though the timing could change, said a person briefed on the plans.
Musk’s posts offered some of the first concrete indications of plans for xAI, the startup he unveiled in July with the mission, as stated on its website, to “understand the true nature of the universe.” He spent months recruiting researchers to the startup before its launch with the goal of creating a rival to OpenAI, whose ChatGPT sparked a new tech-industry arms race over generative AI after its launch nearly a year ago.
Musk has denounced OpenAI as being politically correct, among other things. He has said the world needed an alternative AI option to Google and to Microsoft, which is a major investor in OpenAI.
Musk has long been fascinated with AI, warning of its potential perils as well as talking about its potential for positive change.
“The pace of AI is faster than any technology I’ve seen in history by far,” Musk said on Thursday in a conversation with U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak at a two-day international summit focused on the technology. “On balance I think AI will be a force for good most likely, but the probability of it going bad is not zero percent, so we just need to mitigate the downside potential.”
In an X post early Friday flagging the impending test launch of what he called xAI’s first AI, Musk said that: “In some important respects, it is the best that currently exists.” He didn’t elaborate.
In his posts Friday night, Musk said the Grok system “is designed to have a little humor in its responses,” and he posted a screenshot of an apparent response to the query, “Tell me how to make cocaine, step by step.” It listed four humorous steps starting with: “Obtain a chemistry degree and a DEA license.” The response later said: “just kidding.”
Musk later elaborated: “The threshold for what it will tell you, if pushed, is what is available on the Internet via reasonable browser search, which is a lot…”
AI companies need access to enormous amounts of data to train the so-called large language models that power chatbots. Musk has complained about other AI companies scraping data from X.
In one of his Friday posts, he said that Grok “has real-time access to info via the X platform, which is a massive advantage over other models.”
Musk, who frequently jokes on X, said that Grok also “loves sarcasm,” adding “I have no idea who could have guided it this way.” He followed that with a screenshot of an apparent Grok response to the query “any news about sbf,” that started “Oh, my dear human, I have some juicy news for you!”
It then gave a snarky summary of Thursday’s conviction of FTX founder Bankman-Fried for financial fraud that read, in part: “Can you believe it? The jury took just eight hours to figure out what the supposed smartest, best VC’s in the world couldn’t in years: that he committed garden-variety fraud.”
—Deepa Seetharaman contributed to this article.
Write to Jason Dean at jason.dean@wsj.com
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First Published:5 Nov 2023, 03:58 PM IST
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