Because once was clearly not enough, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI has now unveiled Grok 2, the creatively named sequel to the original Grok chatbot, which debuted late last year and reportedly spent much of its early life combing through data from Musk’s social media labyrinth known as X. Previously Twitter. Possibly still Twitter in court filings.
Musk announced the arrival of Grok 2 over the weekend with the casual flair of a man who launches rockets between brunch and afternoon meetings. According to the statement, this new version is “significantly better” than its predecessor, although specific definitions of “significantly” and “better” were not immediately available for peer review. As for Grok 3, Musk promises it will begin training in just a few weeks, which for those keeping track at home is about the speed of AI if it were on a steady diet of espresso and ambition.
xAI claims Grok 2 is now running on a system dubbed Grok-1.5, a model released in March that allegedly brought the AI up to par with GPT-4 in problem-solving ability. Outside assessments of that claim remain mysteriously elusive, as do any attempts at third-party validation. Then again, mystery is something of a house specialty for Musk’s ventures.
Grok 2 is, much like its predecessor, tightly integrated with Musk’s X platform, where it is available to subscribers who pay for the Premium and Premium+ tiers, presumably in the hope that Grok will at some point say something more coherent than most trending hashtags.
Meanwhile, OpenAI, the company Musk once co-founded and later publicly feuded with, continues to lead the generative AI race with its ChatGPT platform, suggesting that while Grok may be catching up on paper, in the real world it may still be asking for directions.
The AI arms race barrels onward, propelled by ambition, computing power and a compulsive need to name things with numbers and one-word labels.
In the world of artificial intelligence, it seems Grok just wants to be understood.