Fresh from warning that AI was “one of the biggest threats to humanity”, your friendly neighborhood billionaire Elon Musk has unveiled his own chatbot. He’s also said, “It’s based and loves sarcasm”. I can see absolutely no way this can go wrong.

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Elon Musk unveils Grok AI chatbot

Elon Musk has unveiled Grok, his competitor chatbot to ChatGPT. Developed by Musk’s new AI company xAI, one of Grok’s differentiators is that it has access to posts on X. Another is the way it answers questions. Staff at the company said it would answer “spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems” with “a bit of wit” and “a rebellious streak”.

Grok is still in early testing and isn’t available to the public. When it’s released, it’ll be built into X and made available to the platform’s top-tier subscribers.

There’s a strong science-fiction theme, too. xAI staff said Grok was modeled after The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, presumably because of its ability to answer difficult questions. The name goes back a bit further. “Grok” was coined by American sci-fi writer Robert A Heinlein and means “to understand thoroughly and intuitively” according to the Collins English Dictionary.

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