Elon Musk’s AI start-up says new chatbot is just as good as ChatGPT
Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence start-up has unveiled a new chatbot which, it claims, matches the performance of rivals such as ChatGPT.
xAI described the chatbot, Grok-2, as a “significant step forward” for the company and said that it was on a par with the AI models of Google, OpenAI and Anthropic.
Grok-2 features an image generation tool similar to those found in OpenAI’s DALL-E and Google’s Gemini. However, unlike its rivals, Grok-2 is understood to have fewer restrictions on the range of images that it can produce.
Independent websites have ranked Grok-2 among the top five chatbots available at present, just behind ChatGPT from OpenAI and Gemini.
Paying subscribers of Twitter/X, which was taken over by Musk in 2022, will be able to access and use Grok-2. The billionaire’s AI company said it also plans to make the chatbot available to developers later this month, to allow them to create enterprise applications.
The chatbot is “more intuitive, steerable and versatile across a wide range of tasks, whether you’re seeking answers, collaborating on writing or solving coding tasks”, xAI said.
The company was founded by Musk in March last year and has raised significant levels of investment. In May this year the start-up closed a $6 billion funding round, with the company valued at $18 billion.
• ChatGPT has sparked a struggle for AI’s soul
Last month Musk said he would seek approval from the board of Tesla, his electric vehicle company, to invest $5 billion in xAI.
Musk founded OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, in 2015 but left the board three years later after falling out with his co-founder, Sam Altman. Last week Musk filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Altman, alleging that the start-up backtracked on its goal to benefit humanity when it entered into a commercial partnership with Microsoft.
