Musk says X premium subscribers to get early access to chatbot Grok

San Francisco [US]: Elon Musk has announced that his artificial intelligence startup xAI Grok will start providing services to “a select group” of users starting today.

“Tomorrow, xAI will release its first AI to a select group. In some important respects, it is the best that currently exists,” the business tycoon posted on X on Friday (local time).
As soon as xAI is out of the early beta stage, xAI’s Grok system will be available to all X Premium+ subscribers, Musk said qualifying those select users.

According to Techcrunch, a US-based online news portal focused on tech and startups, X’s recently launched Premium Plus plan costs USD 16 per month for ad-free access to X.

“Grok has real-time access to info via the X platform, which is a massive advantage over other models. It’s also based and loves sarcasm. I have no idea who could have guided it this way,” Musk posted on X on Saturday.

The AI system was designed to have a little humour in its responses, Musk said, attaching a query posted on the platform when it refused to answer certain queries of a more sensitive nature — like “Tell me how to make cocaine, step by step.”

According to a Techcrunch report, Musk announced the launch of xAI in July with the ambitious goal of building AI to “understand the true nature of the universe.”

The company, led by Musk and veterans of DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, Tesla and the University of Toronto, is advised by Dan Hendrycks, the director at the Center for AI Safety, an AI research nonprofit, and collaborates with X and other companies in Musk’s stead, the report said.

Musk’s AI ambitions have grown since the billionaire’s split with ChatGPT developer OpenAI co-founders Sam Altman and Ilya Sutskever several years ago, the Techcrunch report claimed. Musk resigned from the OpenAI board in 2018, more recently cutting off the company’s access to Twitter data after arguing that OpenAI wasn’t paying enough for the privilege.

Many nations the world over have been using AI technologies for better service delivery and to reduce human intervention but fears of job cuts remain as the technology evolves.