Elon Musk's AI company's Grok chatbot gets smarter with new feature: Key details

Elon Musk's AI company, xAI, unveiled Grok-1.5V, a new version of its AI model that can now see. According to the company, Grok-1.5V isn't just an update, it's a completely new type of AI called a "multimodal" model. This means it can understand both text and images. “In addition to its strong text capabilities, Grok can now process a wide variety of visual information, including documents, diagrams, charts, screenshots, and photographs,” the company said.

“Advancing both our multimodal understanding and generation capabilities are important steps in building beneficial AGI that can understand the universe. In the coming months, we anticipate to make significant improvements in both capabilities, across various modalities such as images, audio, and video,” said xAI.

According to the company, to develop useful real-world AI assistants, it is crucial to advance a model's understanding of the physical world. “Towards this goal, we are introducing a new benchmark, RealWorldQA. This benchmark is designed to evaluate basic real-world spatial understanding capabilities of multimodal models,” revealed the company.

This comes after the release of Grok-1.5, which was already a big improvement, better at coding and math and able to understand longer sentences. Now with vision, Grok-1.5V competes with other advanced AI models like OpenAI's GPT-4V and Google's Gemini Pro 1.5, claims the company.” Grok-1.5V is competitive with existing frontier multimodal models in a number of domains, ranging from multi-disciplinary reasoning to understanding documents, science diagrams, charts, screenshots, and photographs,” said the company.