Elon Musk has announced the name of his new AI — Grok. The AI chatbot, built by xAI, is the latest rival to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The main difference (in theory) is that Grok will be more fun, and less cautious. However, this remains to be seen, as does the AI chatbot itself! Here’s how to sign up for the Grok waitlist, and begin using Musk’s new AI platform as soon as possible.
How to access Grok AI
Grok is now available to all X Premium+ subscribers in the US, with UK being the next territory to roll out.
The new AI Chatbot was announced by xAI via X (formerly Twitter) on the 5th of November, 2023. Grok is powered by a large language model (LLM) called Grok-1, in the same way that ChatGPT is powered by GPT-4. An immediate competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, as well as Copilot (formerly Bing Chat), Google Bard, and Anthropic Claude-2, Grok promises to address “spicy” topics such as political views with more humor than its artificially intelligent peers. Pious evangelists of the billionaire refer to its USP as being “anti-woke” or “based”, which translates to “less left-wing in my non-left-wing opinion” for those fortunate souls not chronically online.
Step
xAI
Head to the x.ai website. This is where you’ll find Grok and future AI systems developed by xAI.
Scroll down to the bottom of the page, and you’ll see a section called “Early Access to Grok”. This text remains, despite the early access period having ended.
Step
Sign in with X Premium+
Sign in with your X account. If you are an X Premium+ subscriber, you’ll be granted access to Grok for free, but of course you’ll already be paying $16/month for your X account.
If you aren’t an X Premium+ subscriber, you won’t be able to use Grok AI.
No more waitlist – Grok AI has been available to the public since December 8th, 2023
There is no longer a waitlist to access Grok. With access now available to the public, but limited to paying X users, you’ll see the following screen during your sign-up process.
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How to access Grok 1.5
CEO Elon Musk has revealed via X that “Grok 1.5 should be out next month with substantial improvements across the board”.
The comment came in response to a complaint that Grok is “just as prone as ChatGPT” to “provide scientific references that do not” exist. Come February, this should be a thing of the past.
Upon arriving on the xAI website, you’ll be greeted by a blog post. On November 4th, the AI research and development firm gave us a top-level statement regarding the vision for the new AI chatbot, what it will do, and how it will do it.
Grok is an AI modeled after the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, so intended to answer almost anything and, far harder, even suggest what questions to ask!
xAI blog post, November 4th 2023
The official blog post begins by referencing The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the 1978 BBC Radio show, adapted into the 1979 science fiction novel, adapted into the 2005 feature film. Knowing CEO Elon Musk’s eccentric and unserious personality online, it’s no surprise that his AI chatbot will “answer questions with a bit of wit” and a “rebellious streak”.
According to xAI, Grok will have the “unique and fundamental advantage” of “real-time knowledge of the world” thanks to the data source that is the X platform. In addition, it will “answer spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems.” It will be interesting to see what philosophical innovations come from testing the Venn diagram of free speech, large language models (LLM), and AI safety.
Who can access Grok AI?
Only X Premium+ subscribers in the US can access Grok at this time. xAI explains that Grok is still a very early beta product – the best we could do with 2 months of training — so expect it to improve rapidly with each passing week. This process will be accelerated by input from users, and public data scraped from X itself.
“Grok is currently limited to several users in the United States” who will “provide valuable feedback that will help us improve its capabilities before a wider release.” Considering that this iteration of the AI chatbot has only been trained for 2 months, the early access “release just represents the first step for xAI.” As a result, users can expect “new capabilities and features in the coming months.”
