You might’ve heard of Grok, X’s answer to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. It’s a chatbot and, in that sense, behaves as you’d expect — answering questions about current events, pop culture and so on. But unlike other chatbots, Grok has “a bit of wit,” as X owner Elon Musk puts it, and “a rebellious streak.”
Long story short, Grok is willing to speak to topics that are usually off-limits to other chatbots, like polarizing political theories and conspiracies. And it’ll use less-than-polite language while doing so — for example, responding to the question “When is it appropriate to listen to Christmas music?” with “Whenever the hell you want.”
But ostensibly, Grok’s biggest selling point is its ability to access real-time X data — an ability no other chatbots have, thanks to X’s decision to gatekeep that data. Ask it “What’s happening in AI today?” and Grok will piece together a response from very recent headlines, while ChatGPT will provide only vague answers that reflect the limits of its training data (and filters on its web access). Earlier this week, Musk pledged that he would open source Grok, without revealing precisely what that meant.
So, you’re probably wondering: How does Grok work? What can it do? And how can I access it? You’ve come to the right place. We’ve put together this handy guide to help explain all things Grok. We’ll keep it up to date as Grok changes and evolves.
How does Grok work?
Grok is the invention of xAI, Elon Musk’s AI startup — a company reportedly in the process of raising billions in venture capital. (Developing AI is expensive.)
Underpinning Grok is a generative AI model called Grok-1, developed over the course of months on a cluster of “tens of thousands” of GPUs (according to an xAI blog post). To train it, xAI sourced data from the web (dated up to Q3 2023) and from feedback from human assistants that xAI refers to as “AI tutors.”
On popular benchmarks, Grok-1 is about as capable as Meta’s open source Llama 2 chatbot model and surpasses OpenAI’s GPT-3.5, xAI claims.
Image Credits: xAI
Human-guided feedback, or reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), is the way most AI-powered chatbots are fine-tuned these days. RLHF involves training a generative model, then gathering additional information to train a “reward” model and fine-tuning the generative model with the reward model via reinforcement learning.
RLHF is quite good at “teaching” models to follow instructions — but not perfect. Like other models, Grok is prone to hallucinating, sometimes offering misinformation and false timelines when asked about news. And these can be severe — like wrongly claiming that the Israel–Palestine conflict reached a cease-fire when it hadn’t.
For questions that stretch beyond its knowledge base, Grok leverages “real-time access” to info on X (and from Tesla, according to Bloomberg). And, similar to ChatGPT, the model has internet-browsing capabilities, enabling it to search the web for up-to-date information about topics.
Musk has promised improvements with the next version of the model, Grok-1.5, set to arrive later this year.
Grok-1.5, which features an upgraded context window (see this post on GPT-4 for an explanation of context windows and their effects), could drive features to summarize whole threads and replies, Musk said in an X Spaces conversation, and suggest post content.
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