Elon Musk's Grok vs OpenAI's ChatGPT: What sets them apart

Grok is currently in its beta phase and is only accessible to a limited number of users in the US.

Over the weekend, tech billionaire Elon Musk's artificial intelligence startup xAI introduced its new AI model called "Grok," which he says presents a significant challenge to OpenAI's ChatGPT.

But what does "Grok" mean? According to Merriam-Webster dictionary's website, grok refers to the ability to intuitively understand something or comprehend it through empathy.

The AI model distinguishes itself from other generative AI models by providing real-time information through Musk's social media platform X, previously known as Twitter.

Musk highlighted this advantage as a major differentiator and said Grok also possessed a sarcastic side, incorporating humour into its responses.

Let’s take a look at how different its from the immensely popular ChatGPT:

Grok sets itself apart through its reliance on real-time data from X, making sure that its knowledge is up-to-date and relevant.

In contrast, ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, aggregates information from various sources such as Common Crawl, web content, books and Wikipedia.

Grok is designed to answer questions in a clever and slightly cheeky way, setting it apart from how ChatGPT typically communicates.

Grok-1, built on the foundation of Grok-0, was developed over the course of four months. Grok-0, the prototype, was trained on 33 billion parameters, making it comparable to Meta's LLaMA 2, boasting 70 billion parameters.

Improvements in reasoning and coding capabilities led to Grok-1, which excelled in benchmarks like GSM8k, MMLU, HumanEval, and MATH, surpassing other large language models (LLMs) in its compute class such as ChatGPT-3.5 (175 billion parameters) and Inflection-1.

It only lags behind models with more extensive training data such as GPT-4 (1.76 trillion).

In LLMs, parameters represent the "knowledge" gained by the model during its training phase. More parameters generally result in more accurate predictions because the model has access to more contextual information.

LLMs are a type of AI model specifically designed to understand natural language. They can process and generate text, allowing it to be used for a variety of tasks such as language translation, summarisation, and question-answering.

Grok is in its beta phase and is only accessible to a limited number of users in the US. Once it is released to the public, Grok will be available exclusively to X's Premium+ subscribers for a fee of $16 a month. Users can also join the Grok waitlist.

In contrast, ChatGPT offers two versions: a free basic version with limited features and a version priced at $20 a month that provides access to real-time information.