Elon Musk Announces Humorous Grok AI Chatbot for X Premium+ Subscribers

xAI's Grok chatbot
(Image credit: xAI)

On Saturday, Elon Musk and the recently founded xAI company announced Grok. Today it went live to a select beta testing group in the US. Grok is a new large language model (LLM) AI chatbot being built to “assist in the pursuit of understanding,” and inject some humor into its responses. Grok will be available to all X Premium+ subscribers ($16pcm) when it exits beta, but there is no public timeline for this yet.

According to the xAI blog, Grok has been in development for four months, with just two months of training completed. The development team appear to be proud of Grok-1, the debut Grok LLM, and have produced a performance comparison table, which we have reproduced below.

(Image credit: xAI)

From those figures, Grok-1 does indeed seem to be quite an achievement. A comment on the xAI blog frames the progress so far as being “exceptional,” as only models with significantly longer / larger training are better according to the four metrics.

While admittedly somewhat stunted for now, xAI and Musk claim that Grok has a “unique and fundamental advantage,” due to its knowledge gleaned from the Twitter/X platform.

Some may be wondering why we need another LLM, like Grok. A mission statement of sorts comes packed with highfalutin language about “building AI tools that maximally benefit all of humanity,” as well as being a powerful research assistant, and ideas generator.

Grok AI Is Primed for Controversy

Several statements within the launch materials appear to prepare readers for upcoming controversies. One of the mission-statement-style nuggets is that Grok will be “useful to people of all backgrounds and political views.” Moreover, it is stated that it will “answer spicy questions.” Last but not least, its pre-advertized humor, sarcasm, and beta work-in-progress status statements may have been carefully set up as a shield against criticism for the inevitable incoming blunders.

(Image credit: xAI)

For a taste of some Grok interaction, Musk has shared several of the chatbot’s humorous responses to queries. One example can be seen above. Another example of Grok comes from a side-by-side comparison with another GPT, as embedded below.

There is no public timeline for when Grok will be out of beta but you can join a waitlist to hop on the first step of the journey with xAI. If it does indeed turn out to be a valuable tool, its $16pcm entry price slightly undercuts OpenAI’s ChatGPT at $20.

Mark Tyson
News Editor

Mark Tyson is a news editor at Tom's Hardware. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason.

  • Giroro
    I don't want an AI, chat bot, or digital assistant that is in any way trying to be funny, humorous, snarky, or "have an attitude".

    Its like the "free smells" sign at Jimmy John's. It started out as mildly cute the first time anybody saw it, decades later it's now just a passive aggressive middle finger to potential customers, which calls unnecessary attention to their overpriced low-quality sandwiches.

    Don't waste my time. Just find me the impossible-to-google tidbits of information I need (for example "when did Jimmy John's start using 'free smells' signs", or "how much money is $16pcm in usd"), and move on.
    Reply
  • hotaru251

    While admittedly somewhat stunted for now, xAI and Musk claim that Grok has a “unique and fundamental advantage,” due to its knowledge gleaned from the Twitter/X platform.

    ahh yes a ai model trained off the cesspool that is twitter where they got rid of reporting misinformation.....
    Reply
  • bit_user
    I'd say the only part about this which impressed me was the idea of making it somewhat clownish. That lowers users' expectations and probably makes them more forgiving when it outputs rubbish. Still, would you really pay for that?

    I guess the eventual goal is to make something competitive with the OpenAI models, and putting something out there should hopefully give them useful early feedback. I just don't trust Musk enough to get involved in this project.

    hotaru251 said:
    ahh yes a ai model trained off the cesspool that is twitter where they got rid of reporting misinformation.....
    I was about to comment on that exact sentence, too! Even for Musk, I'd imagine they must've done a lot of filtering and curation to eliminate the lower-quality tweets. Otherwise, it would probably sound just like your run-of-the-mill Twitter troll, and who would pay money to use that?
    I'm sure the training data extends beyond Twitter, since there's no way it's learning good math skills from tweets.
    Reply
  • Findecanor
    BTW: The logo infringes on Deutsche Bank's trademark.
    Reply
  • Sleepy_Hollowed
    "humorous"? Let's be accurate and say xenophobic, because that's all it will be. It will quickly get sued and considering the tanking usage of the site it will barely learn anything useful.
    Reply
  • Cool-T
    Every time I see the "formerly known as Twitter" X, like is shown in this article, I get the impulse to click on it, thinking it will close the window.

    But it never works.
    Reply
  • DavidLejdar
    Weren't the offices of the Hitchhiker's Guide taken over by the Vogon? Irony at work? :)
    Reply
  • g-unit1111
    Giroro said:
    I don't want an AI, chat bot, or digital assistant that is in any way trying to be funny, humorous, snarky, or "have an attitude".

    Its like the "free smells" sign at Jimmy John's. It started out as mildly cute the first time anybody saw it, decades later it's now just a passive aggressive middle finger to potential customers, which calls unnecessary attention to their overpriced low-quality sandwiches.

    Don't waste my time. Just find me the impossible-to-google tidbits of information I need (for example "when did Jimmy John's start using 'free smells' signs", or "how much money is $16pcm in usd"), and move on.

    Or like when restaurants started calling appetizers "apps" and sandwiches "handhelds". It was maybe cute for a minute when smartphones first came out, but it's been 15 years now!
    Reply
  • DonQuixoteIII
    Musk just doesn't grok grok.
    Reply
  • King_V
    DavidLejdar said:
    Weren't the offices of the Hitchhiker's Guide taken over by the Vogon? Irony at work? :)
    I thought it was military bots from Frogstar or something like that, wasn't it?
    I haven't read it in a couple of decades though, so my memory is quite foggy on this.
    Reply