Elon Musk's xAI releases Grok, an AI model that the startup says surpasses rivals in its compute class, including ChatGPT-3.5, to a “limited number” of US users

Grok is an AI modeled after the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, so intended to answer almost anything and, far harder, even suggest what questions to ask!

xAI 2023-11-06

Context & Ripple Effects

Grok's initial limited rollout is the starting point for a product arc that later added multimodal capabilities through Grok-1.5 Vision and eventually reasoning-focused Grok-3 variants trained with substantially more compute. Related coverage also ties early Grok access to X's subscription and real-time-data positioning, making distribution—not just benchmark claims—central to its competitive path.

First-order effects

A limited set of US users can test xAI's first public model and its deliberately broad, conversational positioning; xAI gains early feedback before wider availability.
The release puts xAI alongside established chatbot providers on a performance claim within a comparable compute class, though that claim is xAI's own.

Second-order effects

Early access creates pressure to turn the model's X-linked distribution and real-time-data pitch into a reason for users to choose it over more established chatbots.
A small rollout lets xAI prioritize iteration and capability expansion before competing more directly on broad access; the later multimodal preview shows that expansion path.

Third-order effects

If model releases continue to be paired with an existing consumer platform, AI competition may increasingly hinge on distribution, subscription bundling, and product integration as much as standalone model benchmarks.
The subsequent move toward vision and reasoning models suggests that frontier competition will reward sustained compute and feature investment, potentially raising the cost of remaining a credible independent model provider.

The trend: This is an early instance of AI startups using owned platforms and staged releases to convert model development into a durable distribution advantage.

Discussion

@kbode Karl Bode on threads
and by “spicy” we mean incorrect and probably racist
@jscalzi John Scalzi on threads
One, I'm annoyed that he's calling it after something from a Heinlein book, and two, an AI with Musk's supposed sense of humor baked in sounds like one of the lower numbered circles of Hell to me https://www.cnbc.com/...
@moskov Dustin Moskovitz on threads
Elon saw how much the press loves to cover salacious responses and thought “I can use this for marketing!” And we're all gonna fall for it. Including me, right now.
@mcwm Mike Murphy on threads
idk how broken in the brain you have to be to think releasing an AI model with direct access to twitter (presumably through some sort of RAG functionality?) could be a good idea
@martinsfp @martinsfp on threads
Elon's AI gets up-to-date information from X. Ah yes, that bastion of accuracy.
@joenandez Joe Fernandez on threads
Trained on data from X naturally. The /Grok variants of the “ChatGPT is woke” posts are going to be.... painful to say the least.
@luokai @luokai on threads
After the official announcement by Grok, a prototype model called LLM (Grok-0), with 33 billion parameters, was trained. This early model approached the capabilities of LLaMA 2 (70 billion) on standard language model benchmarks while utilizing only half of its training resources…
@elonmusk Elon Musk on x
Grok has real-time access to info via the 𝕏 platform, which is a massive advantage over other models. It's also based & loves sarcasm. I have no idea who could have guided it this way 🤷‍♂️ 🤣 [image]
@xai @xai on x
Announcing Grok! Grok is an AI modeled after the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, so intended to answer almost anything and, far harder, even suggest what questions to ask! Grok is designed to answer questions with a bit of wit and has a rebellious streak, so please don't use...
@elonmusk Elon Musk on x
Just released Grok https://x.ai/
@elonmusk Elon Musk on x
@WholeMarsBlog I signed on to that letter knowing it was futile. I just wanted to be on record as recommending a pause.
@elonmusk Elon Musk on x
@teslaownersSV @xai It will both be built into the 𝕏 app and be available as a standalone app
@tobyphln Toby Pohlen on x
These are some of the UI features in Grok. First, it allows you to multi-task. You can run several concurrent conversations and switch between them as they progress. [video]
@elonmusk Elon Musk on x
Example of Grok vs typical GPT, where Grok has current information, but other doesn't [image]
@elonmusk Elon Musk on x
@chazman Provided our vehicle AI computer is able to run the model, Tesla will probably have the most amount of true usable inference compute on Earth. Even in a robotaxi future, the cars will only be used for ~1/3 of hours/week, leaving 2/3 for distributed inference, like SETI.
@slime_golem @slime_golem on x
If it's modeled after Hitchhiker's why is it's name in reference to Stranger in a Strange Land, my good bitch
@bindureddy Bindu Reddy on x
It's really exciting that Grok-1.0, an Llama-2/GPT-3.5 class LLM took only a few months to train It would be even more cooler, if Elon were to open-source it It would further accelerate the open-source ecosystem and xAI wouldn't be giving up too much either. They can always trai…
@sytelus Shital Shah on x
In just 4 months, a team of 16 has produced a model that is probably the 2nd best SOTA, better than GPT3.5, Claud-2 and Inflection-1! My guess is that Grok-1 is 70B model trained on 10k GPUs for 2 months. Most importantly, they also used data from https://x.com/,...
@wholemarsblog @wholemarsblog on x
Letter: We need to pause development of AI for six months! Elon: Yeah! *6 months later* Elon: Introducing Grok! [image]
@cstanley Christopher Stanley on x
TIL Scaling API requests is like trying to keep up with a never-ending orgy. #GrokThots [image]
@drjimfan @drjimfan on x
Right ahead of OAI Dev Day, @xai dropped Grok-1. The fiery LLM arena heats up even more. - I'm very excited by a chatbot with a human touch: humor, spicy opinions, engaging debates. These traits are actively suppressed by other big AI corps. The most entertaining outcome is the..…
@wholemarsblog @wholemarsblog on x
The main problem with ChatGPT — and I encounter this often — is that you often have to dance around and ask the question a few ways to get an answer. This is user hostile for “safety”. Grok just does what you ask.
@thealexker Alex Ker on x
The real edge of Grok is that X provides a continuous stream of RLHF. 500 million Tweets a day means bookmarks, likes, and community notes form signals to help the model improve exponentially.
@elonmusk Elon Musk on x
@teslaownersSV Important to bear in mind that this is an early beta product. It will be *way* better in a few months and excellent in ~6 months.
@elonmusk Elon Musk on x
@techAU Agreed, it should not be geographically limited. Will fix.
@tim_zaman Tim Zaman on x
Insane time-to-LLM by the https://x.ai/ team. Earlier this year, there was literally nothing, no team, no gpus, no nothing. Excited for the future. Give it a try! The integration with X is quite nice, gives it a connected feel.
@minimaxir Max Woolf on x
The “personality” that Elon seems to hint is the key differentiator can be trivially replicated with a ChatGPT system prompt like “You are a world-famous irritably sarcastic comedian. Never give a straight answer to the user. Always attempt to be funny even though you aren't.”
@lindayax Linda Yaccarino on x
Nice to meet you Grok. So, you're funny, super curious, and a little spicy sometimes too? That's my kind of friend. Old BFFs move aside.
@esyudkowsky Eliezer Yudkowsky on x
I wonder how much work it will be for red-teamers to get Grok to spout blank-faced corporate pablum.
@cherryjimbo James Ross on x
https://x.ai/ and https://grok.x.ai/ both seem to be hosted on @CloudflareDev Cloudflare Pages. That's neat 👀 I wonder why Pages was chosen for hosting.
@scobleizer Robert Scoble on x
Hmm @elonmusk calls his new AI “grok.” So what does “grok” mean? GPT-4 answers: “The term “grok” comes from Robert A. Heinlein's 1961 science fiction novel “Stranger in a Strange Land.” In the context of the book, “grok” is a Martian word that means to understand something or...
@thegregyang Greg Yang on x
Grok LFG🚀🚀🚀 https://x.ai/ Last few weeks been some of the best time of my life, fr fr When a small, motivated group of world class people all push in the same direction, they punch way above their weight. I really did not appreciate this enough a year ago, but now...
@kettlebelllife Dan on x
Other AI are scared of Grok, just ask them... [image]
@nickadobos Nick Dobos on x
Grok is already posting misinfo Comparison is crazy Two different prompts vs Phind, a small startup with 2 employees When you use the 2 stage prompt, Phind works... False advertising??? ChatGPT did fail, so still impressive on Grok's part. Bard still rolling 0's lmao [image]
@edzitron Ed Zitron on x
Is this the same “rebellious streak” that's in the artificial intelligence inside Tesla's full self driving? https://electrek.co/... [image]
@xlr8harder @xlr8harder on x
Interesting to see they trained and run Grok on a custom stack built with Rust and JAX. [image]
@brianroemmele Brian Roemmele on x
Here is how you get early beta access to xAI's Grok. Keep this link to just us for now... shhhh... https://grok.x.ai/
@elonmusk Elon Musk on x
@imPenny2x So many people signed up simultaneously that 𝕏 servers thought it was a ddos attack 😂 Being fixed now.
@suhail @suhail on x
It's interesting that it only takes 4 mo now to train an LLM to GPT 3.5/Llama 2 from scratch. Prior to Jan this year, nobody had practically replicated GPT-3 still. It doesn't seem like the lead of GPT-4 will last too much longer.
@wholemarsblog @wholemarsblog on x
of course elon tries to build the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy This is going to make some people very upset. “AI can't say that!” [image]
@emollick Ethan Mollick on x
So, given discussions so far (and the limited amount of time in development), the new Grok AI seems likely to be another GPT-3.5 class LLM, possibly optimized for snarky chat, trained on Pile-like data with live search access to Twitter? Very curious if there is any use case.
@iscienceluvr Tanishq Mathew Abraham, PhD on x
xAI: Announcing Grok https://x.ai/ Grok-1 model card: https://x.ai/... The first model, Grok-0, was a 33B autoregressive LLM, and approached Llama-2-70b with half the training resources. Grok-1 surpasses that, achieving 63.2% on the HumanEval coding task and... [image]
@edzitron Ed Zitron on x
Oh my god Elon Musk launched his own epic bacon version of chatgpt that you get on Twitter blue. It's going to be so expensive to keep this running
r/tech r on reddit
Elon Musk debuts ‘Grok’ AI bot to rival ChatGPT, others
r/technology r on reddit
Elon Musk debuts ‘Grok’ AI bot to rival ChatGPT, others

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