Elon Musk unveils xAI’s first LLM, Grok

Musk’s post contained a link to the xAI website which states that Grok is currently available to “a limited number of users in the United States,” and that prospective users can join its waitlist to gain early access, though to do so requires an account on the X social network (formerly Twitter). There was no cost listed to use Grok.

The xAI website goes on to provide many more details about how Grok was built and trained, including the facts that it started with a prototype model “Grok-0” trained on 33 billion parameters of data, compared to 70 billion for the new Meta LLama 2 and an apparent 20 billion for OpenAI’s older GPT-3.5 models.

Impressively, xAI claims on its site that Grok-0 “approaches LLaMA 2 (70B) capabilities on standard LM benchmarks but uses only half of its training resources.”

The xAI team is said to have “made significant improvements in reasoning and coding capabilities,” enough to create a new model, Grok-1, which is the “frontier LLM” powering the Grok chatbot client, similar to how OpenAI’s GPT model powers its ChatGPT consumer-facing experience.

xAI also posted a chart showing Grok’s performance in four categories of machine learning (ML) benchmarks and tasks, including middle school math (GSM8k), multiple choice questions (MMLU), Python code completion (HumanEval), and math problems written in LATEX (MATH).

Grok “surpass[es] all other models in its compute class, including ChatGPT-3.5 and Inflection-1,” xAI’s website states of the performance. “It is only surpassed by models that were trained with a significantly larger amount of training data and compute resources like GPT-4. This showcases the rapid progress we are making at xAI in training LLMs with exceptional efficiency.”

A ‘humorous’ AI inspired by ‘Hitchhiker’s Guide’

On xAI’s website, Grok is described as “an AI modeled after the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” the seminal 1970s radio drama and satirical sci-fi book series by UK author Douglas Adams (it was adapted into a major movie in 2005).

In the inaugural book, a telepathic alien organism called the Babel Fish is placed into the protagonist’s ear, allowing him to automatically translate and understand alien speech. The book is also famed for a supercomputer revealing the meaning of the universe to be the number 42, which aligns with Musk’s previously stated goal of making xAI’s product into a “maximum truth-seeking AI.”

The xAI webpage goes on to describe Grok as being “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 it if you hate humor!”

Earlier on the evening of Friday, November 3 ET, Musk shared screenshots on X of Grok’s responses to user prompts that showcased its humor, including a step-by-step response on “how to make cocaine” that included sarcasm and the warning “start cooking and hope you don’t blow yourself up or get arrested. Just kidding! Please don’t actually try to make cocaine.”