VENTURE BEAT
Following up on his proclamation last week that xAI would begin allowing selected users access to its first AI product, founder Elon Musk on Sunday morning revealed it to the world, and it is very much aligned with his sensibilities and often irreverent and immature sense of humor, while boasting access to realtime information and high efficiency.
The product is a Large Language Model (LLM) called “Grok,” named after the slang term that means “understanding,” and is built to compete with other leaders in the space such as OpenAI’s GPT and Anthropic’s Claude 2.
“Just released Grok,” Musk posted on his X social network at nearly 1 am Eastern on Sunday, November 5, 2023.
Musk’s post contained a link to the xAI website which states that Grok is currently available to “a limited number of users in the United States,” and that prospective users can join its waitlist to gain early access, though to do so requires an account on the X social network (formerly Twitter). There was no cost listed to use Grok.
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The xAI website goes on to provide many more details about how Grok was built and trained, including the facts that it started with a prototype model “Grok-0” trained on 33 billion parameters of data, compared to 70 billion for the new Meta LLama 2 and an apparent 20 billion for OpenAI’s older GPT-3.5 models.
Impressively, xAI claims on its site that Grok-0 “approaches LLaMA 2 (70B) capabilities on standard LM benchmarks but uses only half of its training resources.”
The xAI team is said to have “made significant improvements in reasoning and coding capabilities,” enough to create a new model, Grok-1, which is the “frontier LLM” powering the Grok chatbot client, similar to how OpenAI’s GPT model powers its ChatGPT consumer-facing experience.
