Elon Musk introduces his own chatbot Grok

Tech billionaire Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup is competing with ChatGPT with its own chatbot. The software called Grok is initially only available to some users in the US.

The special thing about the chatbot is that it has direct access to current information from X, start-up X.AI said this weekend at the launch of the software. Grok also answers ‘spicy’ questions that would be rejected by most other artificial intelligence systems. As a prerequisite, users must be subscription customers of Musk’s online platform X (formerly Twitter) – in the most expensive tier, which costs $16 per month in the US.

Musk, who himself represents the political views of the American right, has long accused other technology companies of being, in his view, too politically correct and restricting freedom of expression. After taking over Twitter, he relaxed the rules on speech tolerated by the platform. Because many companies fear a negative climate for their brands, Twitter and X’s advertising revenues halved after the acquisition.

However, many experts see the danger exactly the other way around – and warn that AI systems such as chatbots can too easily fall into racist, homophobic or otherwise discriminatory statements. This may be due, for example, to the abundance of data with which they are trained.

AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, developed by the start-up OpenAI, can formulate texts at the language level of a human. The principle behind this is that they estimate word by word how a sentence should proceed. The models are trained using enormous amounts of text.

Musk was once involved in the founding of OpenAI, but then withdrew. The tech entrepreneur and head of electric carmaker Tesla criticizes the fact that OpenAI is now profit-oriented rather than its original non-profit intentions. Grok launched this weekend ahead of an OpenAI developer conference where new features are expected.

Musk has been warning for years that artificial intelligence could be dangerous to humanity. In the spring, he was one of the signatories of an open letter calling for a six-month halt to the development of artificial intelligence software to create a regulatory framework during this period.

However, his intentions were quickly questioned after it was revealed that his own AI company, X.AI, was founded around the same time. According to the company, the Grok chatbot was developed in about four months. About the vision of X.AI, Musk previously said that the software must understand the nature of the universe.

(yam/sda/dpa)