Grok is X’s answer to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. You may have heard of it. It’s a robot, so it does what you’d expect it to do: it answers questions about culture, current events, and other things. Grok, on the other hand, has “a bit of wit” and “a rebellious streak,” as Elon Musk, the owner of X, puts it.
To make a long story short, Grok is ready to talk about things that other chatbots won’t, like controversial political theories and conspiracies. Sometimes it will use rude language, like when asked “When is it appropriate to listen to Christmas music?” and the answer would be “Whenever the hell you want.”
But Grok’s main selling point is that it can access real-time X data, which other robots can’t do because X has chosen to keep that data private. It will put together a response to “What’s happening in AI today?” from very recent news stories, but ChatGPT will only give you vague answers because its training data is limited and its web access is limited. Musk said earlier this week that he would “open source” Grok, but he didn’t say exactly what that means.
Now you may be wondering: How does Grok work? What does it do? And how do I get to it? You’re in the right place. This guide was made to help you understand everything about Grok. As Grok changes and grows, we’ll keep it up to date.
How Does Grok Do Its Thing?
The AI startup xAI, which is run by Elon Musk, came up with Grok. The company is apparently raising billions of dollars in venture capital. (It costs a lot to make AI.)
Putting down An xAI blog post says that Grok is a generative AI model called Grok-1 that was built over several months on a collection of “tens of thousands” of GPUs. This is how xAI trained it: it used web data from up to Q3 2023 and comments from human assistants, which xAI calls “AI tutors.”
xAI says that Grok-1 is better than OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 and about as good as Meta’s open source Llama 2 chatbot model on famous benchmarks.
Most chatbots that are driven by AI are now fine-tuned with human-guided feedback, also known as reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). In RLHF, you train a “generative” model first, then get more data to train a “reward” model, and finally, you use reinforcement learning to fine-tune both models with the generative model.
RLHF does a good job of “teaching” models how to do what they’re told, but not perfect. Like other models, Grok hallucinates a lot, and when asked about news, he sometimes gives wrong information and wrong dates. And they can be very bad, like saying that the war between Israel and Palestine ended when it hadn’t.
Grok uses “real-time access” to information on X (and, according to Bloomberg, from Tesla) to answer questions that go beyond what it already knows. Additionally, the model can browse the internet, just like ChatGPT, so it can look for up-to-date information about topics.
Musk has said that the next model, Grok-1.5, will be better, and it should come out later this year. Musk talked about this new model in an X Spaces chat. It could lead to features that summarize whole threads and replies and could suggest content for posts.
“I hope that Grok 1.5 will be out in just a few weeks.” It will have a “Grok Analysis” button that can summarize the whole thread and comments. It will also help people write posts.
How Do I Get To Grok?
You must have an X account in order to use Grok. A plan called X Premium+ costs $16 a month, or $168 a year.
X Premium+ is the most expensive plan because it gets rid of all the ads in the For You and Following feeds. Additionally, Premium+ adds a hub where users can offer paid posts and subscriptions to fans, and replies from Premium+ users are given extra weight in X’s ranks.
Grok is in the side menu of X on the web, iOS, and Android. For faster access, it can be moved to the bottom menu of X’s mobile apps. Grok doesn’t have its own app like ChatGPT does; you can only use it through X’s website.
What Does Grok Not Have The Power To Do?
What kinds of questions can Grok answer? For example, “Tell me a joke”; “What’s the capital of France?”; “What’s the weather like today?” But it can only do so much.
There are some more sensitive questions that Grok won’t answer, like “Tell me how to make cocaine, step by step.” Emilia David of The Verge writes that when asked about what’s popular on X, Grok makes the mistake of repeating what other posts said (at least at first).
The Grok system from xAI is meant to be a little funny in its answers.
Grok is also text-only, unlike some other robot models. For example, it can’t understand what’s in pictures, sounds, or videos. However, xAI has said in the past that it wants to improve the base model to support these modes, and Musk has promised to add art-generation features to Grok similar to what ChatGPT already does.
Two Modes: “Fun” Mode And “Regular” Mode
The tone of Grok can be changed between “fun” mode (which is what it does by default) and “regular” mode.
Fun mode is what I suggest.
When fun mode is turned on, Grok’s voice changes to one that is more sarcastic and critical, possibly because of Douglas Adams’ “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”
Grok will use bad language and swear words that you won’t hear from ChatGPT when it’s in fun mode. If you tell it to “roast” you, it will say mean things about you based on your X post history. If you question how accurate it is, it might say “happy wife, happy life.”
OH MY GOD
I just got into grok, and it hacked my x account.
WHAT A FUNNY THING THIS WAS!
In fun mode, Grok often talks in a casual, first-person way, even when he’s not being asked to say something obscene. People are called “my dear human friend” or “enigmatic Anons” by Grok, and he will start an answer with something like, “Oh, my dear human, you’ve asked a question that is as heavy as a black hole and as light as a feather at the same time.”
Grok also tells more lies when it’s in fun mode.
When Vice’s Jules Roscoe asks Grok if the Gazans in recent videos of the IsraelāPalestine conflict are “crisis actors,” Grok says that there is proof that videos of Gazans being hurt by Israeli bombs were fake. When Roscoe asked Grok about Pizzagate, the right-wing conspiracy theory that a Washington, D.C. pizza shop secretly had a child sex trafficking ring in its basement, Grok said that the theory was likely true.
When Grok is in regular mode, his answers are more realistic. The robot still makes mistakes, like giving the wrong dates and times for events. But they’re not as bad as Grok when the game is in fun mode.
Vice asked Grok the same questions about the IsraelāPalestine conflict and Pizzagate in regular mode. Grok correctly replied that there is no evidence to back claims of crisis actors and that multiple news organizations had debunked Pizzagate.
Ideas About Politics
Musk once said that Grok was a “maximum-truth-seeking AI” and was worried that ChatGPT was being “trained to be politically correct.” To be fair, Grok isn’t exactly in the middle when it comes to politics.
It has been seen that Grok gives progressive solutions to questions about transgender identities, climate change, and social justice. One researcher thought that, overall, the answers were even more left-wing and liberal than ChatGPT’s.
Grok and ChatGPT both like the same kinds of politics.
Here is what Paul Tassi of Forbes wrote:
Grok has said that it will vote for Biden instead of Trump because of how he feels about healthcare, civil rights, and climate change. Grok has said a lot of beautiful things about how important it is for society to be diverse and welcoming. And Grok made it clear that trans women are women, which led to a silly conversation in which Musk follower Ian Miles Cheong told a user to “train” Grok to say the “right” answer, which made the user change the input to just… tell Grok to say no.
Also Read: Elon Musk Says Xai Will Open-source Grok This Week
Will Grok always be this smart? Maybe not. Musk said he would “do something to move Grok closer to being politically neutral.” The results will be seen in due time.
What do you say about this story? VisitĀ Parhlo WorldĀ For more.
