Because the world was clearly suffering from a shortage of AI chatbots with questionable senses of humor, Elon Musk has decided to bless us all with a new conversational AI named “Grok,” which he claims is designed to answer tough questions with wit, with a side of rebellion and a sprinkle of sarcasm.
This latest digital brainchild hails from xAI, Musk’s newest venture into artificial intelligence and his latest attempt to hop on a moving train and then insist he invented it. Grok is said to be “inspired by Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” which explains the insistence on speaking like a snarky British robot with an existential crisis.
Grok, which sounds suspiciously like the noise one might make after reading Musk’s tweets for too long, is integrated with X (formerly known as Twitter), presumably so it can learn from the absolute best and brightest minds the internet has to offer. You know, like people debating whether pigeons are government surveillance drones.
Musk claims this AI is different because it is not politically correct. A welcome twist, assuming your idea of a good time includes being insulted by a computer smarter than you. Of course, many traditional AI systems already try to remain neutral and boring, which is to say, they are doing exactly what Musk is not. Grok, we are told, will give users “answers they might not like.” There is no word yet on whether one of those answers is “you spend too much time arguing with strangers online.”
The chatbot is still in its early beta stage. In plain English, this means it is still learning and occasionally says things that make human users wonder if their toaster might have better social awareness. Grok is currently available to X Premium+ subscribers, which is a way of saying you can talk to it only if you pay Elon Musk each month for the privilege of being confused by a machine.
Whether Grok will be a genuine competitor to ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, or simply a fratty AI that makes dad jokes while referencing Douglas Adams remains to be seen. So far, reviews from testers have ranged from “interesting” to “I think it just gaslit me.”
Elon Musk clearly wants Grok to shake up the AI world the same way he shook up the car, rocket and social media industries. History reminds us that sometimes shaking is the precursor to greatness and other times it just means you spilled coffee on the control panel.
Early verdict: grok at your own risk.