Elon Musk added a new feature for Premium+ subscribers on X, formerly known as Twitter. Called Grok, it is an AI Chatbot created by the billionaire’s new company called xAI and it will be available for premium X subscribers.
According to the team, Grok is “modeled after The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” and it is intended to answer almost anything. It even has the ability to suggest questions to the user if they are stumped.
X said that Grok has an advantage in that it “has real-time knowledge of the world via the X platform. It will also answer spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems.” That last part can be tricky as AI with that ability usually doesn’t last long. Ask Microsoft’s Tay on that front – thanks to Twitter users, it went south in just 24 hours back in 2016.
A reason that Grok is behind a paywall is the claim by Musk that generative AI developers are scraping data off the platform. This led to the paywall and locking of the platform’s API to developers looking to get data to teach fledgling AIs.
X itself said that it “is still a very early beta product – the best we could do with 2 months of training.” The company is looking to have subscribers to help teach the new AI as more time passes by.
xAI said that Grok was “built to build AI tools that maximally benefit all of humanity as well as to serve as a powerful research assistant for anyone.”
Currently, Grok is available to limited users in the United States only. While it is behind a paywall, Grok still undercuts ChatGPT with the Premium+ monthly fee of only USD 16 (about RM 74) versus ChatGPT’s USD 20 (about RM 93).
