Elon Musk's artificial intelligence venture, xAI, is positioning itself as a competitor to OpenAI, which Musk helped establish in 2015 before eventually parting ways with it. xAI is rolling out its own large language model, just like OpenAI's ChatGPT, featuring a new capability to scrape the 'free speech' platform X in real-time.
Early Friday morning, Musk posted, "Tomorrow, @xAI will release its first AI to a select group. In some important respects, it is the best that currently exists."
Tomorrow, @xAI will release its first AI to a select group.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 3, 2023
In some important respects, it is the best that currently exists.
Then, on Friday night, Musk wrote, "As soon as it's out of early beta, xAI's Grok system will be available to all X Premium+ subscribers."
As soon as it’s out of early beta, xAI’s Grok system will be available to all X Premium+ subscribers
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 4, 2023
Musk's post reveals Grok is a model that answers questions conversationally and could be based on models similar to train ChatGPT and other text-generating models (such as Meta's Llama 2).
Here's some of Musk's humor:
Grok has real-time access to info via the 𝕏 platform, which is a massive advantage over other models.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 4, 2023
It’s also based & loves sarcasm. I have no idea who could have guided it this way 🤷♂️ 🤣 pic.twitter.com/e5OwuGvZ3Z
Details about Grok remain scarce, yet indications are that the wealthiest man in the world is initiating a 'counter LLM' movement that will challenge the already mass-available LLMs on the market, such as ChatGPT, which is super 'woke' and has Soviet-style censorship.
In April, Musk sat down with Tucker Carlson in an interview and discussed the need to develop his own LLM called TruthGPT, a "maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe."
"I'm going to start something which you call TruthGPT or a maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe. And I think this might be the best path to safety in the sense that an AI that cares about understanding the universe is unlikely to annihilate humans because we are an interesting part of the universe."
By July, Musk launched xAI. The company is led by the billionaire and former employees of OpenAI, DeepMind, Google Research, and Microsoft Research, as well as employees from Tesla and folks from the University of Toronto.
Musk has taken issue with OpenAI's GPT in the past, expressing that the underlying model is super biased and "woke."
"The overarching goal of xAI is to build a good [artificial general intelligence] with the overarching purpose of understanding the universe," the billionaire has previously said, adding, "The safest way to build an AI is to make one that is maximally curious and truth-seeking."
In September, Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle, revealed that xAI had signed a contract to train its AI model on Oracle's cloud.
On Thursday, Musk, speaking at the United Kingdom's AI Safety Summit, warned AI is "one of the most disruptive forces in history."
He told British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, "AI will be a force for good most likely, but the probability of it going bad is not zero percent."
Musk then compared AI to a "magic genie" and explained that fairy tales with magic genies that grant wishes "don't end well" and cause people to "be careful what you wish for."
To sum up, Musk has just kicked off the counter LLM movement against the censorship industrial complex's current chatbots on the market. This is more evidence the parallel economy is gaining momentum.
