Musk's AI company presents its own chatbot
Tech billionaire Elon Musk's AI start-up is competing with ChatGPT with its own chatbot. However, the software called Grok is initially only available to some users in the USA.
As a prerequisite, they have to be subscription customers of Musk's online platform X (formerly Twitter) - in the most expensive tier, which costs 16 dollars per month in the USA and a good 19 euros per month in Germany.
Announcing Grok!
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…— xAI (@xai) November 5, 2023
The special thing about the chatbot is that it has direct access to current information from X, explained the start-up X.AI at the launch of the software at the weekend. Grok also answers "spicy" questions that most other systems based on artificial intelligence would reject.
Musk, who himself holds political views on the American right, has long accused other tech companies of being too politically correct in his view and restricting freedom of speech. Following the takeover of Twitter, he relaxed the rules for statements tolerated by the platform. As many companies fear a negative environment for their brands, Twitter and X's advertising revenue halved after the takeover.
Experts see danger
However, many experts see the danger the other way around - and warn that AI systems such as chatbots can too easily lapse into racist, homophobic or otherwise discriminatory comments. This may be due to the wealth of data used to train them, for example.
AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, which was developed by the start-up OpenAI, can formulate texts at the linguistic level of a human. The principle behind this is that they estimate word by word how a sentence should continue. The models are trained with huge amounts of text.
Musk himself was once involved in the founding of OpenAI, but then withdrew. The tech entrepreneur and head of electric car manufacturer Tesla criticized the fact that OpenAI is now profit-oriented instead of its original non-profit intentions. Grok was launched at the weekend ahead of an OpenAI developer conference, from which new functions are expected.
Musk has been warning for years that artificial intelligence could become dangerous for humanity. In the spring, he was one of the signatories of an open letter calling for the development of software with artificial intelligence to be paused for six months in order to create a regulatory framework during this time. However, his intentions were quickly called into question after it became known that his own AI company X.AI was founded around the same time. According to the company, the Grok chatbot was developed within around four months. Among other things, Musk previously said that X.AI's vision was for the software to understand the nature of the universe.
Source: www.dpa.com
