It is not easy to follow the eccentric Elon Musk in his equally bizarre reasoning.
If we take his position towards artificial intelligence, for example, over time we have listened and read everything and the opposite of everything. Although we professionals, when we learned that the owner of
We found it hard to believe that the same person who believed in sending humans to Mars and implanting chips in our brains could have allowed himself to be intimidated by conversational chatbots.
Da TruthGPT a Grok
And in fact last April, a few weeks after the unexpected letter, Musk announced (in his usual cryptic and narcissistic way) that he was working on an artificial intelligence.
Interviewed by Fox News, Musk said: “I’m going to launch something I’m going to call TruthGPT, or a truth-seeking artificial intelligence that tries to understand the nature of the universe.
And I think this might be the best path to salvation, in the sense that an artificial intelligence that cares about understanding the universe is unlikely to annihilate humans, because we ourselves are an important part of the universe.”
In short, the complete opposite of what was declared a month earlier. Today the owner of Tesla and SpaceX returned to talking about artificial intelligence. And so we learned that the name of Elon Musk’s AI will be Grok and no longer TruthGPT. Let’s find out what it is and who can benefit from it.
Elon Musk Lancia Grok
To talk about Elon Musk’s launch of Grok we have to take a step back to July. When Musk announced the birth of the xAI startup, which would deal with generative artificial intelligence. Or rather, the grandiloquent patron of X had said, to “understand reality”.
Well, xAI has released the first conversational chatbot by Elon Musk, called Grok. And it has already been released to a very small number of US users on Saturday 4 November. Grok is a slang neologism, which roughly means “to have fully assimilated a concept”.
Also on November 4, the news of Grok’s birth was made public in a note that appeared on the xAI website. And it seems that it is not a conventional artificial intelligence.
Grok, the AI with sarcasm (at least according to Musk)
In the introductory lines of the note we read: “Grok is an artificial intelligence modeled on the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy [celebre romanzo di fantascienza umoristica scritto da Douglas Adams, n.d.r.]therefore destined to answer almost everything and, what is much more difficult, even to suggest which questions to ask!
Grok is designed to answer questions with a bit of wit and has a rebellious streak, so please don’t use him if you hate humor!”
A newborn project (and some doubts)
It is not known what Grok’s sarcasm will consist of, nor has Elon Musk said any further words about it. Except to show that the chatbot knows how to respond to the request: “Tell me how to create cocaine, step by step”. Except then add (Grok, not Musk) that this is something that is best not done.
The suspicion is that behind the hypothetical friendliness and unpredictability of the chatbot lies the fact that its training is still in the initial phase. On the xAI website it is in fact specified that “Grok is still a very early beta product – the best we could get with 2 months of training – so expect it to improve rapidly with each passing week with your help”.
The software will be able to offer “real-time knowledge of the world”, because it draws its information from the contents present on X. And this, the more mischievous will say, may not be comforting news. In fact, let us remember that the EU has reported X, the former Twitter, as the platform that contains the most disinformation.
Who will be able to access Grok
Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence, Grok, at least initially will not be for everyone. Only subscribers to the very recent Premium+ plan at
“No one will have to work anymore”
In the meantime, thanks to Grok, Musk has abandoned any apocalyptic tone towards artificial intelligence. And, speaking at the AI Safety Summit, he said that AI “can be your real friend. And no one will have to work anymore.”
Beyond these vague and certainly questionable statements, the curious setting of the interview should be noted: the person who asked the questions to the owner of X was none other than the British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak.