What Is Grok? What We Know About Musk's AI Chatbot | Built In (2024)

Grok is an AI chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s company xAI. Grok is able togenerate text and engage inconversations with users, similar toChatGPT and other tools. Unlike otherchatbots, though, it can access information in real-time through X (formerly Twitter) and isprogrammed to respond to edgy and provocative questions with witty and “rebellious” answers.

Grok is essentially Musk’s answer to ChatGPT, whose maker (OpenAI) he co-founded in 2015 but left in 2018 after areported power struggle with now-CEO Sam Altman. Musk has since condemned ChatGPT for beingtoo left-leaning and dangerous. According to Musk, xAI is intended to be a direct competitor to OpenAI, with its Grok chatbot not only serving as ChatGPT’s “anti-woke” counterpart, but also showcasing new possibilities in the largergenerative AI space.

What Is Grok?

Grok is an artificial intelligence chatbot developed by xAI. Released in November of 2023, it is now available to users with a Premium+ subscription to the social media platform X.

Grok-1, thelarge language model that powers Grok, was trained using a custom tech stack based on software management systemKubernetes, machine learning framework JAX and coding languageRust, all of which helped xAI to develop Grok faster and more efficiently than other chatbots.

Like all LLMs, Grok-1 was trained on massive amounts of text data scraped from the internet, which includes everything from Wikipedia articles to scientific papers. But what makes Grok different is its direct access to posts made on X. This enables Grok to have “real-time knowledge of the world,” according to the company, which gives it a “massive advantage over other models,” as Muskput it.

Grok offers two interaction styles: “Fun Mode” and “Regular Mode.” By default, Grok operates in “Fun Mode,” which causes the chatbot to take on a more edgy or humorous personality and, at times, produce factually incorrect responses. “Regular Mode” typically delivers more accurate answers, but as with all AI chatbots, xAI says it can still generatefalse or contradictory information.

Grok’s sense of humor and “personality” was modeled afterThe Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, one of Musk’s favorite books.

“It’s a book on philosophy, disguised as a book on humor,” Musk said inan interview with computer scientist and podcaster Lex Fridman. With Grok, xAI is working to maintain that ethos while also adhering to “the truth of the universe,” Musk explained, and eventually discovering new truths — approaching something closer toartificial general intelligence, where a machine can learn and think like (or even better than) a human.

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Why Is It Called Grok?

Grok’s name is believed to have originated from Robert A. Heinlein’s 1961 science fiction novelStranger in a Strange Land, in which the story’s main character, a Martian, uses the term “grok” to convey a profound and intuitive understanding of something.

While Musk has never officially confirmed the meaning of Grok’s name, heposted “Stranger in a Strange Land” on X the day after Grok was announced, likely referencing Heinlein’s book. By adopting this word, xAI appears to envision Grok as more than just another chatbot, but a tool to “assist humanity in its quest for understanding and knowledge,” according to its website.

What Can Grok Do?

Grok can draft emails, debug code, generate ideas and more — and all influent, human-like language. It simply receives an input (like a command or question), applies knowledge from its training data, and uses sophisticatedneural networks to generate a relevant text output.

While it is used in the same ways as other AI chatbots, “Grok will probably say ‘yes’ to a lot more jobs that you give it,” saidSharon Gai, an author and speaker who focuses on the AI industry.

Indeed, xAI says Grok is willing to answer questions that most other chatbots would refuse, no matter howtaboo or potentially harmful they may be. For example, Musk shared ascreenshot of Grok offering a step-by-step guide to making cocaine for “educational purposes,” which included instructions like “start cooking and hope you don’t blow yourself up or get arrested.” He shared anotherscreenshot of Grok offering advice for what to do if you get an STD in increasingly “vulgar” ways.

“It’s touted as a little bit like Musk himself, in that it’s supposed to be kind of tongue in cheek,”Lance Whitney, freelance tech journalist who hascovered Grok and other AI chatbots extensively, told Built In. It is designed to be more of a “playful and fun chatbot,” he added, “where you can go to have a more offbeat or snarky conversation.”

From a user interface standpoint, Grok can also handle multiple queries simultaneously and users can toggle between those answers, as shown in avideo demonstration by xAI co-founder Toby Pohlen. Code generations can be opened directly in aVisual Studio Code editor, while text responses can be saved in a markdown editor for later use.

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Grok vs. ChatGPT: How Are They Different?

While both Grok and ChatGPT share the goal of facilitating human-like interactions through artificial intelligence, they approach it in fairly different ways, offering their own unique strengths and weaknesses. Here are a few:

1. Grok has Access to Real-Time Information, ChatGPT Does Not

Grok has direct, real-time access to posts on X, whereas ChatGPT’s free version only knows information up to January of 2022, and its paid version only knows information up to April of 2023. This means Grok can engage in conversations about more recent events, such as the Israel-Hamas war or the 2024 Super Bowl. In fact, depending on the question asked, Grok will actually display real posts on X that it is referencing in order to show where its point of view is coming from.

However, a Vice investigation found that Grok tends to spout inaccuracies about current events and lend credence to unproven conspiracy theories — due largely to X’s propensity fordisinformation and evenhate speech since Musk’spurchase of the site in 2022.

2. Grok Is Less Politically Correct Than ChatGPT

In Musk’s words, Grok is “maximum truth-seeking” and “based,” meaning it is unapologetic and communicates without regard for political correctness.

“[Musk] believes that free speech should be allowed to every and any degree,” Gai said. “That is what Grok is modeled after as well.”

xAI’s creation of a less politically correct chatbot comes at a time when most other big AI companies are working to make their own chatbots even more PC. OpenAIclaims its newGPT-4 LLM, which powers ChatGPT’s paid version, is 82 percent less likely to respond to requests for “disallowed content,” which includes material that is “hateful, harassing” and “violent.” And Anthropic’sClaude chatbot was trained using constitutional AI, whichhelps to reduce the likelihood of it generating toxic, dangerous or unethical responses.

Because ChatGPT and Grok approach truth and safety in such different ways, “they have entirely different purposes,” Whitney said. Grok is explicitly designed to answer questions in a non-PC way, so “it’s not necessarily a chatbot I would go to for research,” he continued. “I would sooner go to ChatGPT.”

At the same time, though, ChatGPT is much more limited in the subjects it is willing to discuss with users, so it’s not always as useful as Grok. For example, Gai said she tried to use ChatGPT to help summarize a text involving suicide, and it outright refused to do the job. “It’s not like I was investigating into suicide for myself or anybody else, it was just refusing to even touch that job,” she said. “But that is something Grok would not refuse.”

Grok could also be useful in understanding the “zeitgeist,” Whitney said, because it has direct access to social media posts. “If I wanted to get a sense of what people are thinking about a certain topic, what they’re discussing and how they feel about it, I would go to Grok.”

3. Grok Scores Better Than ChatGPT on Exams

Grok-1 scored better on benchmark exams in middle school math, high school math, code completion and language understanding than GPT-3.5, the LLM that powers ChatGPT’s free version. It also earned a C-grade on theHungarian national high school finals in mathematics — a test the model was not explicitly tuned for — outperforming GPT-3.5 once again.

It’s worth noting, however, that Grok-1 still didn’t score as well as GPT-4 on any of these exams. But xAI says that is because GPT-4 is trained on a “significantly larger amount of training data and compute resources.”

“Grok-1 displayed strong results, surpassing all other models in its compute class,” the company said. “This showcases the rapid progress we are making at xAI in training LLMs with exceptional efficiency.”

4. ChatGPT Can Process Images, Grok Cannot

GPT-4 is multimodal, meaning it can handle both text and image inputs. For example, it can suggest recipes from a photo of an open refrigerator, or make predictions based on what is happening in a corresponding picture.

For now, Grok can only accept text as inputs. But xAI says it will be equipped with visual and audio capabilities in the future.

5. ChatGPT Is Free, Grok Costs $16 a Month

The basic version of ChatGPT is completely free to use. A premium version is also available for $20 a month. There is no free version of Grok at this time; it is only available to people who pay $16 a month for a premium subscription to X.

6. Grok Has an Open Source Version, ChatGPT Does Not

In March 2024, xAIreleased the network architecture and base model weights of its large language model Grok-1 under the Apache 2.0 open-source license, which allows other developers to use and build on the model — including for commercial purposes. The open-source version is from the pre-training stage of development, meaning users will likely have to fine-tune the model on their own before putting it to work.

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How to Use Grok

Here’s how to access and use Grok:

1. Sign up for a Premium+ plan on X. As of now, Grok is only available to X users with this type of plan, which costs $16 per month.
2. After subscribing, visit the Grok sign-in page to verify your account and credentials.
3. If you receive a message stating Grok’s early access program isn’t available in your local area, submit your email address to get an update once it is available.
4. If you’re given access to Grok, choose a mode. The chatbot offers a “Regular Mode” for typical responses and a “Fun Mode” for more entertaining answers.
5. Use the chatbox function to submit requests and start conversations with Grok. Grok also provides basic prompts for inspiration.

Frequently Asked Questions