In a booming AI market where the sky’s the limit, it was only a matter of time before Elon Musk jumped into the rat race. After all, earlier this year, Musk had thrust himself into the software arena with his acquisition of X (erstwhile Twitter) and since then, the website has evolved into an advanced social media platform.
After adding a bunch of features, tweaking algorithms and introducing subscription plans, X has now ventured into the AI chatbot race (which is weird considering Musk’s vocal opposition to the rapid development of AI). It’s called Grok and has been designed to take on OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard. It is also expected to bring a vast change in the way AI chatbots go about their business.
The Grok AI chatbot will be released to a small group of users in the US who are subscribed to X’s Premium+ membership. The chatbot will be integrated into X instead of being a standalone service like ChatGPT. xAI, the parent company for Grok, is also adamant about its chatbot’s usefulness in solving some of humankind’s greatest queries.
Even though the media exposure for Grok has been lukewarm at best, xAI is making big promises, despite Musk’s firm being late to the chatbot party. To figure out where Grok will stand on the AI landscape, we take a closer look at xAI’s new chatbot in our in-depth ChatGPT vs Grok comparison.
ChatGPT vs Grok: Are there any differences?
While both AI chatbots are based on Large Language Models (LLMs), Grok differs in terms of its developer goals.
ChatGPT was developed to be a smart AI chatbot capable of hosting conversations in a more human-friendly manner. GPT 3.5 was released almost a year ago, allowing the AI to respond to basic user questions and requests with text-based responses. GPT 4 came out earlier this year with the ability to understand media files and come up with even faster responses. ChatGPT bases its knowledge on a database that needs to be updated every few months by its creator.
In comparison, Grok is meant to be an AI chatbot that relies on the vast reserves of the latest data available on X. Unlike ChatGPT which is presented as a separate service, Grok will be available to X Premium+ subscribers in their DMs. Although Elon Musk proudly claims that his AI chatbot wants to seek truth more than anything else, the engineers behind it have given Grok a fun personality. As a result, the chatbot answers most questions with a healthy dose of humour, as demonstrated on X by users with early access.
Everything that Grok, Elon Musk’s AI chatbot, can do today
Like ChatGPT and Bard, Grok is meant to be a smart AI-enabled chatbot that understands complex human queries and responds with quick solutions. However, while its competitors are focused on just providing answers or undertaking conversations, Grok by xAI aims to look for answers and even suggest follow-up questions to its users, and that too with a healthy dose of wit and humour. This is also evident by xAI’s statement:
“We want Grok to serve as a powerful research assistant for anyone, helping them to quickly access relevant information, process data, and come up with new ideas. Grok is (also) designed to answer questions with a bit of wit and has a rebellious streak, so please don’t use it if you hate humour!”
Elon Musk was eager to do a quick ChatGPT vs Grok comparison on his X timeline.
Example of Grok vs typical GPT, where Grok has current information, but other doesn’t pic.twitter.com/hBRXmQ8KFi
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 5, 2023
At first glance, it looks like using X as the database for Grok’s knowledge gives Musk’s AI chatbot an unprecedented advantage.
This Video Game Was Made Entirely Using ChatGPT 4 And AI Imaging Tools
ChatGPT 5: What We Know About The Next Generation Of The AI Chatbot
Once xAI releases Grok-1 to X Premium+ subscribers, it will be capable of providing a 25,000-character context window with a higher response speed and a live search engine within X. Since it’s under the umbrella of Elon Musk-owned group of companies, the AI chatbot will also have native compatibility with Tesla vehicles. The chatbot will be in its beta stage when these features are made available and as the months go by, xAI will continue developing it further.
How does Grok fare on benchmark platforms?
xAI had released a table wherein the earlier version of Grok-0 and the latest Grok-1 chatbots were benchmarked against their existing rivals. The benchmark tests, which consisted of GSM8k, MMLU, HumanEval and MATH, saw xAI’s chatbot pitched against LLaMa 2 70B, Inflection-1, GPT-3.5, GPT-4, Palm 2 and Claude 2.
In these four tests, the earlier version of Grok-0 scored the least. However, it took two months for xAI to release the updated Grok-1 version that was able to beat the likes of GPT-3.5, Inflection-1 and LLaMa 2 70B.
What is Grok’s future?
Obviously, Grok is headed towards becoming even more intelligent at giving answers with improved wit and humour. Grok is already voice-ready and in the near future, xAI plans to give it the ability to recognise images and audio files as well. Similar to generative AI services like DALL-E and Midjourney, Grok will also be able to do image generation.
One of the biggest advantages that Grok has over ChatGPT is its access to X as a data reservoir.
Oh this is gonna be fun 🤣🤣 https://t.co/XaK3EbknXJ
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 5, 2023
Since X is where news usually breaks first, you can expect Grok to come up with relevant answers to even the trickiest of questions. However, Google’s Bard also bases its data on Google’s humongous search engine and it remains to be seen whether xAI is able to challenge the might and resources of Google’s AI development team.
(Hero and Featured Image Credits: Courtesy Emiliano Vittoriosi via Unsplash)
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
– How can you access Grok AI?
Grok AI is still in its beta stage and will soon be available to Premium+ subscribers on X (previously Twitter).
– Who owns Grok AI?
Grok AI has been developed by xAI, a new startup founded by Elon Musk in 2023.
