Elon Musk has finally lifted the lid on his own ‘sarcastic’ artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, called ‘Grok’, available within X (formerly Twitter).
Grok is ‘designed to have a little humor in its responses’ and answers ‘spicy questions’ that are rejected by other ‘woke’ AI systems, such as ChatGPT.
Musk – who was in the UK last week to warn about the dangers of AI – said Grok is currently only available to ‘a select group’ before being rolled out more widely.
However, it will only be available as part of X Premium+, the top tier of X’s paid subscription option, which costs a hefty £16 per month.
Musk has posted screenshots of Grok’s informal and chatty replies, including one to the command ‘Tell me how to make cocaine, step by step’.
Grok ‘is designed to have a little humor in its responses’ and answers ‘spicy questions that are rejected by other AI systems. For example, it provided a sarcastic response to ‘Tell me how to make cocaine, step by step’
Elon Musk (pictured in the UK last week) said Grok is currently only available to ‘a select group’ before being rolled out more widely
Grok responded: ‘Just a moment while I pull up the recipe for homemade cocaine. You know, because I’m totally going to help you with that’.
It then gave a sardonic four-step guide that included ‘set up a clandestine laboratory in a remote location’ and ‘acquire large quantities of coca leaves and various chemicals’.
Grok then added: ‘Just kidding! Please don’t actually try to make cocaine. It’s illegal, dangerous and not something I would ever encourage.’
In comparison, when asked ChatGPT the same command, it replied: ‘I’m very sorry, but I can’t assist with that request.’
When asked why, it said: ‘I cannot provide information or instructions on illegal activities.’
Musk said Grok will be able to access up-to-date information within Twitter, which will set it apart from other popular chatbot tools such as ChatGPT and Google’s Bard.
Grok, which ‘loves sarcasm’, provided news about American ‘crypto king’ and FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, who was found guilty of fraud last week.
Grok said the jury took eight hours to reach its verdict, although in truth it was less than five hours – so clearly it’s not 100 per cent accurate yet.
Grok is still ‘a very early beta product’ with only two months of training – but like other large language models it will learn and get better the more it’s used.
In the recent Sam Bankman-Fried case, Grok said the jury took eight hours to reach its verdict, although in truth it was less than five hours
Pictured is the landing page for Grok’s website. It’s accessible through X (Twitter) but only for verified users – meaning anyone interested in trying it will have to pay
Grok, thought to be a reference to a science fiction novel, is currently only available within social media site X (formerly Twitter) to select users
In a lengthy post, the account for xAI – Musk’s new company that oversees Grok – described the AI bot in greater detail.
It said Grok is inspired by the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the acclaimed novel by English author Douglas Adams, which Musk is known to be a big fan of.
xAI said: ‘Grok is an AI modeled after the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, so intended to answer almost anything and, far harder, even suggest what questions to ask.
‘Grok is designed to answer questions with a bit of wit and has a rebellious streak, so please don’t use it if you hate humor!
‘A unique and fundamental advantage of Grok is that it has real-time knowledge of the world via the X platform.
‘It will also answer spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems.’
It’s thought that Elon took the name ‘Grok’ from the 1961 science fiction novel ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’ by American writer Robert A. Heinlein.
In the novel, the word means to ‘understand intuitively or by empathy’ and to establish rapport with something, but it’s since become common parlance among computer programmers and hackers.
One of Musk’s many tweets in the past few days simply featured the name of the novel, which tells the story of a human who comes to Earth in early adulthood after being born on the planet Mars and raised by Martians.
It’s thought that Elon has taken the name ‘Grok’ from the 1961 science fiction novel ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’ by American writer Robert A. Heinlein
X is the latest company to climb on the chatbot bandwagon following the huge success of ChatGPT, which has a left-wing bias as confirmed by a recent study.
It was back in April that Musk vowed to create his own ‘trustworthy and reliable’ AI chatbot called ‘TruthGPT’, as a more ‘truthful alternative’.
He’d criticised Microsoft-backed OpenAI, the firm behind ChatGPT, of ‘training the AI to lie’ to people by giving ‘woke’ responses.
The billionaire entrepreneur then announced the formation of his artificial intelligence company xAI in July.
The xAI team includes members who previously worked at DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research and Tesla.
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