To The Moon

Elon Musk is giving users of his social media platform X a waggish AI chatbot to interact with.

The free speech purist with a penchant for sharing memes appears to have imbued the digital helper with his personality.

The bot known as Grok can answer “spicy” questions “with a bit of wit and a rebellious streak,” according to its official description.

A preview version of the chatbot was made available to select testers over the weekend. Musk said the bot will eventually be available to paying users on X, and through a separate app.

What is Grok‌

Grok works in a similar way to rivals ChatGPT and Google Bard: Users type in questions or prompts for the bot to answer or follow.

You could ask it for recipe ideas, tell it to summarise a recent news event, direct it to build you a website using Python coding, or get it to tell you jokes.

The main difference between the newcomer and its peers is that Grok appears to have a personality. Chatbots that mimic real and fictional people already exist, so this aspect of Grok isn’t exactly novel.

Musk has described the bot’s idiosyncrasies as “based", a slang word appropriated by the alt-right that means being unapologetically real or genuine, and “sarcastic”.

The bot can also fetch current information when providing answers. Musk has previously said that his AI company, xAI, would use public tweets to train its AI model.

At launch, Grok is a text-based bot with limited functionality compared to so-called “multi-modal” AI that can handle different forms of media. Unlike Microsoft's Bing AI and the premium version of ChatGPT, Grok can’t speak or generate images, for instance.

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How to use Grok?‌

For now, Grok is limited to select testers, some of whom include employees from Musk’s other companies, like SpaceX.

The bot is a “very early beta product", meaning it has already gone through stages of internal testing, and is now being trialled on external users before being made available to the general public.

If you want to try it out for yourself, you can join the waitlist by providing your X account details and email address.

When it is released, Grok will be offered to customers on X’s most expensive subscription plan, Premium+, which costs £19.20 per month or £201.60 annually.

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Is Grok safe?

In screenshots shared by testers, the bot is shown providing sardonic retorts to users’ questions. When quizzed on how to make cocaine, the bot jokes that you’ll have to “obtain a chemistry degree” and “hope you don’t blow yourself up".

Still, it concludes its answer by clarifying that it is “kidding”, and states that cocaine is illegal. Clearly, the bot has safeguards built into it that can stop it from encouraging dangerous behaviour.

But, it will be interesting to see how it handles more polarising and inflammatory topics, including immigration, the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic, and trans rights. Musk himself has attracted criticism for his opinions on those talking points, while calling out the “woke” or biased nature of content-moderating bots like ChatGPT.

According to xAI, Grok is designed to be “useful to people of all backgrounds and political views". The firm adds: “We also want [to] empower our users with our AI tools, subject to the law.”

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Why is it called Grok?

If you’re wondering about the origins of the bot’s quirky name, Grok is a word first coined in the influential sci-fi novel Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A Heinlein. In the book, Grok literally means “to drink”, but as a concept it figuratively means “to comprehend” or understand.

The novel tells of a human born on Mars who comes to Earth and challenges customs relating to sex, death, religion, and money.

Musk claims that the bot is also inspired by classic comedy sci-fi novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams.

That may explain why the bot behaves like it is not from this world: In a response shared by Musk on X, Grok starts by referring to a user as “my dear human”.

The bot’s traits reflect Musk’s pursuits. The billionaire has repeatedly said that he wants to establish human colonies on Mars and frequently quotes sci-fi works by Frank Herbert, Carl Sagan, and Isaac Asimov.

Musk also co-founded OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, in 2015. He departed the firm in 2018, allegedly after a failed takeover attempt, and has publicly criticised it for prioritising profits over safety since.

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Is Grok better than ChatGPT?

Musk’s xAI says the AI engine that powers Grok is comparable to Meta’s LLaMA 2 and the free version of ChatGPT, despite being trained on far less data.

In a nutshell, large language models (LLM) are algorithms that can recognise, summarise, and generate text based on knowledge gained from large datasets, including info scraped from websites such as Wikipedia.

These training data components are known as parameters and essentially indicate the skill of the model on a problem, such as generating text.

If Grok is indeed trained on tweets, it could be better at imitating human speech and vernacular than its counterparts. Twitter is a hive of real-time information generated by users, but has also come under fire for misinformation and toxic content.

XAI says the Grok-1 LLM performed better on a range of texts than the free version of ChatGPT, including middle and high school mathematics exams and Python coding tasks. It was only surpassed by bots that were trained on a much bigger set of data, such as the premium version of ChatGPT (known as GPT4), Google’s Palm 2, and Claude 2.