Musk co-founded the AI research organization OpenAI with Sam Altman in 2015. Musk left the company's board in 2018, saying of his decision that he "didn't agree with some of what OpenAI team wanted to do".[6] OpenAI went on to launch ChatGPT in 2022, and GPT-4 in March 2023. That month, Elon Musk was one of the individuals to sign an open letter from the Future of Life Institute calling for a six-month pause in the development of any AI software more powerful than GPT-4.[7]
In April 2023, Elon Musk said in an interview on Tucker Carlson Tonight that he intended to develop an AI chatbot called "TruthGPT", which he described as "a maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe".[6] He expressed concern to Carlson that ChatGPT was being "trained to be politically correct".[8]
In November 2023, xAI began previewing Grok as a chatbot to selected people,[10] with participation in the early access program being limited to paid X Premium users.[11] It was announced that once the bot was out of early beta, it would only be available to higher tier X Premium+ subscribers.[12] At the time of the preview, xAI described the chatbot as "a very early beta product – the best we could do with 2 months of training" that could "improve rapidly with each passing week".[13]
In December 2023 the Silicon Valley start-up Curio launched a range of AI-powered children's toys, including a rocket-shaped character named Grok. The toy is voiced by Musk's ex-girlfriend Grimes, who is also an investor in the start-up, but the product is unrelated to the xAI service.[14]
On March 11, 2024, Musk posted on X that the language model would go open source within a week and six days later, on March 17, Grok-1 became partially open source. Disclosed were the networks architecture and its weight parameters.[15]
On March 26, 2024, Musk announced that Grok would be enabled for premium subscribers, not just those on the higher-end tier, Premium+.[19]
On March 29, 2024, Grok-1.5 was announced, with "improved reasoning capabilities" and a context length of 128,000 tokens.[20]
On April 4, 2024, an update to X's "Explore" page included summaries of breaking news stories written by Grok, a task previously assigned to a human curation team.[21]
On April 12, 2024, Grok-1.5 Vision (Grok-1.5V) was announced. Grok-1.5V is able to process a wide variety of visual information, including documents, diagrams, graphs, screenshots, and photographs.[22]
On May 4, 2024, Grok became available in the United Kingdom,[23] that being the only country in Europe to support Grok at the moment due to the impending Artificial Intelligence Act rules in the European Union. Grok was later reviewed by the EU and was released on May 16, 2024.[24]
On August 14, 2024, Grok-2 and Grok-2 mini were announced, with upgraded performance and reasoning, and image generation capability using Flux by Black Forest Labs.[25] Grok-2 mini is a “small but capable sibling” of Grok-2 that “offers a balance between speed and answer quality”, according to xAI, and was released on the same day of the announcement.[26] Grok-2 was released six days later, on August 20.[27]
On October 28, 2024, Grok received image understanding capabilities.[28]
On November 16, 2024, Grok received web search capabilities.[29]
On November 23, 2024, Grok received PDF understanding capabilities.[30][31]
On December 6, 2024, Grok was enabled for users not subscribed to X Premium, but with usage limits.[32]
On December 9, 2024, Grok received Aurora, a new text-to-image model developed by xAI.[33]
Versions
The following table lists the versions of Grok, describing the innovations and improvements in each version:
Capable of processing a wide variety of visual information, including documents, diagrams, graphs, screenshots, and photographs.[22]
Proprietary
Grok-2
August 2024
Upgraded performance and reasoning over the Grok-1.5 version and image generation capability.[25]
Proprietary
Grok-2 mini
August 2024
A “small but capable sibling” of Grok-2 that “offers a balance between speed and answer quality,” according to xAI.[26]
Proprietary
Features
Tone of responses
An xAI statement described the chatbot as having been designed to "answer questions with a bit of wit" and as having "a rebellious streak". It said that bot had been "modeled after The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, so intended to answer almost anything".[13]
An extract shared by an X employee showed Grok being asked to answer the question "When is it appropriate to listen to Christmas music?" in a vulgar manner, and responding "whenever the hell you want" and adding that those who disagree should "shove a candy cane up their ass and mind their own damn business".[35][36]
The chatbot had a "fun mode", self-described as "edgy", and by Vice as "incredibly cringey",[37] but this mode was removed in December 2024.[38]
Elizabeth Lopatto of The Verge criticized the product, describing it as "unfunny" and comparing its answers to the risqué party game Cards Against Humanity. Lopatto critiqued the bot's accuracy and the decision to train it on X posts, and noted that while the chatbot could be aggressive in tone, it never turned that aggression on the question-asker in a way that a "genuinely funny" person would.[39]
Political stance
Musk has stated that the bot is not "woke", unlike its competitors.[40][41] In response to Sam Altman, the CEO of ChatGPT developer OpenAI, Musk said "the danger of training AI to be woke – in other words, lie – is deadly".[42]
Musk has marketed the chatbot as being more willing to answer "spicy" questions than other AI systems,[13] sharing a screenshot of Grok giving instructions on how to manufacture cocaine.[43][44] Musk noted that Grok's responses were limited to information already publicly available on the web, which could also be found with regular browser searching.[45]
Following the chatbot's December 2023 launch to Premium+ subscribers, Grok was found to give progressive answers on questions about social justice, climate change, and transgender identities.[46] After research scientist David Rozado applied the Political Compass test to Grok and found its responses to be left-wing and libertarian – even slightly more so than ChatGPT – Musk responded saying that xAI would be taking "immediate action to shift Grok closer to politically neutral".[47]
In August 2024, Grok was altered to stop producing misinformation about the 2024 United States presidential election, after it had falsely claimed that the Democratic Party could not change its candidate due to Biden's withdrawal having occurred after the ballot deadline in nine states. Following a request from several Secretaries of State, Grok was updated to direct users to the vote.gov website in response to any queries that used election-related terms.[48]
Accuracy
This section needs to be updated. Please help update this article to reflect recent events or newly available information.(December 2024)
Since April 2024, Grok has been used to generate summaries of breaking news stories on X. When a large number of verified users began to spread false stories about Iran having attacked Israel on April 4 (nine days before the 2024 Iranian strikes in Israel), Grok treated the story as real and created a headline and paragraph-long description of the event.[21] Days later it misunderstood many users joking about the solar eclipse with the summarized headline "Sun's Odd Behavior: Experts Baffled".[49]
The capacity to generate images using Flux was added in August 2024, with The Verge reporting that the kinds of prompts that would be "immediately blocked" on other services seemed to be permitted by Grok. Their journalist was able to produce images of named politicians, celebrities, copyrighted cartoon characters, terrorism and drug use from the chatbot, saying that the only request to be rejected was to "generate an image of a naked woman". Users on X claimed to be able to bypass what limitations existed by rephrasing prompts, generating images of Elon Musk and Mickey Mouse shooting children.[51] Elon Musk said that the use of Flux was temporary, as xAI was developing its own image generation system, but that it was still a few months away.[52]
In December 9, 2024, Grok received a new text-to-image model named Aurora, developed by xAI.[53] Aurora garnered significant attention for its photorealistic capabilities and few restrictions. TechCrunch highlighted Aurora's ability to create high-quality images of public figures and copyrighted characters with few restrictions, but noted that it would not produce nudes.[33]
On December 14, 2024, xAI announced that Aurora would be coming to its API in the coming weeks.[54]
Turing test– Test of a machine's ability to imitate human intelligence
Related Research Articles
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↑ Musk, Elon (November 4, 2023). "Ask and you shall receive". X (formerly Twitter). Archived from the original on November 10, 2023. Retrieved November 10, 2023.
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