Elon Musk’s xAI (nee Twitter) have just released a beta product named Grok (named from Sci-Fi author Robert Heinlein’s cyber-slang) meaning “to understand”
Grok is based on large language models (LLM’s) like ChatGPT and has been trained on millions of articles from the Web. Where it differs is in retrieving up-to-date facts directly in real time from the X platform (amongst other sources) as a method distinct from updating ChatGPT using so-called RAG files (retrieval augmented generation). For such a new and relatively young project, Grok seems to be fairing well in terms of performance scores beating/equaling many of the established closed- and open source products (including ChatGPT 3) whilst falling short of the performance of ChatGPT 4
Also distinct is its Musk-like penchant for sarcasm which it uses to side-step what X are calling “spicy” prompts which many other GPT-variants either ignore or to which they generally give a fairly weak “I don’t know” or some other kill-joy response.
Musk’s new platform will be available soon to X-premium subscribers and whilst it won’t actually tell you how to cook crystal meth it will at least try amuse you in the process of NOT telling you how to cook it.
