Musk's Ai Firm Offers Up Its Own Chatbot, But For A Fee

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov 6 (Bernama-dpa) -- Tech billionaire Elon Musk's AI start-up, X.AI, is competing with ChatGPT with its own chatbot, Grok, which was launched over the weekend ahead of an OpenAI developer conference, reported German news agency (dpa). 

However, Grok is initially only available to some users in the US. As a prerequisite, they have to be subscription customers of Musk's online platform X, formerly known as Twitter, in the most expensive tier, which costs US$16 per month in the US and about €19 per month in Germany.

The chatbot has direct access to current information from X, explained the start-up X.AI at the launch of the software at the weekend. Grok also answers questions of a more provocative nature that are rejected by most other systems based on artificial intelligence.

AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, which was developed by the start-up OpenAI, can formulate texts at the linguistic level of a human. The principle behind this is that they estimate word by word how a sentence should continue. The models are trained with massive amounts of text.

Musk himself was once involved in the founding of OpenAI, but then withdrew. The tech entrepreneur and head of electric car manufacturer Tesla criticised the fact that OpenAI is now profit-oriented instead of its original non-profit intentions. 

Musk has been warning for years that artificial intelligence could become dangerous for humanity. In the spring, he was one of the signatories of an open letter calling for the development of software with artificial intelligence to be paused for six months in order to create a regulatory framework during this time. 

However, his motives were quickly called into question after it became known that his own AI company, X.AI, was founded around the same time. According to the company, the Grok chatbot was developed in around four months.

Musk previously said that X.AI's vision was for the software to understand the nature of the universe.

-- BERNAMA-dpa