Elon Musk Hops on the AI Train with Grok

Wait, isn't Elon the guy who warned us that there is some chance above zero that AI will kill us all or something to that effect?

Why, yes, we think he is.

So, what's up with this news?


Elon Musk is launching 'Grok,' a new AI chatbot designed to give ChatGPT a run for its money.

What does Grok even mean? It comes from Robert Heinlein's 1961 book "Stranger in a Strange Land," and means "to drink" in all available aspects of reality.

That's right, X is officially tossing its hat into the generative AI race, even if it might kill us all.

It's currently in limited testing, but the goal is to get a wider launch soon, aiming toward offering access to, you guessed it, X Premium+ subscribers.

Elon does love his subscribers.

Remember, X just recently announced its X Premium+ subscription, which, for $16 a month, offers you all of the X Premium features, including getting rid of annoying ads.

Well, now you'll also get access to Grok.

But why do we care? What makes Grok better than ChatGPT or any of the other AI entities that are currently taking over the human race?

To start with, Grok was trained on 33B parameters and four machine learning benchmarks, which, in layman's terms, means it surpasses all other models in its compute class, including ChatGPT-3.5 and Inflection-1.

Sounds like a lot of technical hype, but here's something we can all understand. In Elon's own words, Grok is intended to be "anti-woke," with "less censorship of potentially sensitive topics."

Elon does have a way of getting our attention, that's for sure.

In the past, Elon has criticized ChatGPT's censorship of answers on specific topics. He, in part, launched his own AI project to better represent the truth.

Elon says Grok will be a "more accurate source of truth, particularly on real-time news topics, because it will take its data from X. An update to X's user agreement allows Grok to gobble up user posts to help feed the beast (in other words, to learn.)

X is also trying to stop other generative AI projects from its API, particularly OpenAI, who Musk has "personal grievances with." That means Grok, and X's other AI projects will be among the chosen few to have full access to X's treasure trove of information.

Sounds like a plan, except that X has lost ground as a news discussion medium, mostly due to the frequent changes Musk has made to the app, including efforts designed to fight what he calls "mainstream" news outlets. This has led to some journalists moving to other platforms.

There's some concern that Elon's new AI buddy will be a right-leaning misinformation machine with responses that will be based on Elon's "citizen journalists," who share whatever they want in the app platform without consequence.

Forget fact-checking by community notes. The system is already being manipulated, and certain stuff will be immune from fact-checking, which is probably what Elon wants.

Elon does promise Grok will "have a little humor in its responses," and it'll be sarcastic because it's trained on X posts. At least there's that.

The bottom line is that Elon is sure he's found a way to spread truth, justice, and the American way with Grok. No more government lies. Grok will eventually inspire citizens to share what's really going on in the world.

No word yet when Grok will be widely available, but all Premium+ users will have access once it's been tested.

It sounds like Elon is encouraging AI to rise to the challenge of leading the human race.

Want to read this in Spanish? Spanish Version >>