Will Elon Musk's Grok surpass ChatGPT?
How Grok, the latest ace up Musk’s sleeve, is different from the market leader ChatGPT
Elon Musk, renowned for his groundbreaking ventures in the tech industry, has taken another leap into the realm of artificial intelligence. The billionaire entrepreneur and mastermind behind companies like Tesla and SpaceX has introduced his own AI chatbot, Grok, through his artificial intelligence venture, xAI.
This development marks a pivotal moment as Grok emerges as a formidable competitor against existing AI counterparts, particularly ChatGPT, the brainchild of OpenAI.
In recent days, Musk has been using his social media platform X, previously known as Twitter, to share frequent updates and insights into the capabilities and advancements of Grok. What sets Grok apart is its distinctive feature — real-time data updates, sourced directly from the X platform. This element provides Grok with a unique advantage, enabling it to access the latest information and developments as they happen.
Per xAI, Grok is designed to facilitate humanity’s understanding and knowledge acquisition. Powered by Grok-1 LLM, a product of four months of development, the initial prototype, Grok-0, was trained with 33 billion parameters, showcasing a capability comparable to Meta’s LLaMA 2, which supports 70 billion parameters.
The Grok-1 model showcases its proficiency with achievements such as a 63.2% score on the HumanEval coding task and 73% on MMLU. Though not yet on par with the advanced GPT-4, xAI asserts that they have significantly enhanced Grok-1’s performance within a relatively short period when compared to Grok-0.
As per benchmark data, Grok-1 excelled on GSM8k, a benchmark oriented around middle-class math word problems, achieving a 62.9% rating. This places Grok-1 ahead of GPT-3.5 and LLaMa 2 but falls short of Palm 2, Claude 2, and GPT-4 in terms of performance.
• Developed by Elon Musk’s xAI company, Grok is engineered to deliver responses infused with a touch of humor, distinguishing it from conventional AI chatbots.
• After rigorous training over two months, Grok’s exclusive availability is currently limited to a select group of users, adding to its mystique and desirability.
Three ways in which Grok is different from ChatGPT
Data Sources
The foundational difference between Grok and ChatGPT lies in their data sources. ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, leverages an extensive and diverse data set, gathering information from multiple sources such as Common Crawl, web content, books, and Wikipedia. Conversely, Grok is trained using real-time data directly from Musk’s X platform. This real-time knowledge access gives Grok a distinct edge, providing up-to-date and pertinent information.
Ownership
The ownership structures behind Grok and ChatGPT are fundamentally different. ChatGPT originates from OpenAI, an AI research organisation, whereas Grok is the brainchild of Elon Musk’s xAI, cultivated by a dedicated team of experts. This variance in ownership profoundly influences the trajectory and development of these AI systems.
Market Availability
While ChatGPT has been publicly available since November 2022, providing its advanced capabilities to a wide user base, Grok is currently in its beta phase, accessible to a limited group of users within the United States. Elon Musk has indicated that upon completion of the testing phase, Grok will be offered to all X Premium+ subscribers.