Photo illustration: Aïda Amer. Photo: Ludovic Marin/AFP via Getty Images
Elon Musk Saturday introduced a new chatbot called "Grok" out of his xAI startup, claiming that AI should be "useful to people of all backgrounds and political views."
Driving the news: xAI spent four months training Grok, which it categorizes as a "frontier large language model" — which would make it subject to new AI testing requirements both from the White House and those agreed upon at last week's AI safety summit in London.
X claims Grok is "a very early beta product" with a sense of humor and "a rebellious streak" — but since hardly anyone has access to the service currently, it's hard to test the claim.
- Grok will "answer spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems," the company says.
Between the lines: The xAI team says the "fundamental advantage of Grok is that it has real-time knowledge of the world via the X platform."
Context: The team that built Grok includes alumni of DeepMind, OpenAI, Google and Microsoft.
Ina's thought bubble: The characterization of Grok could add a political dimension to the AI market, with customers evaluating not just how accurate AI is, but also how much they like the politics of the answer.