X
Elon Musk explicitly warned against AI – and is now launching his own chatbot called Grok
Elon Musk has been warning for years that artificial intelligence could be dangerous for humanity.
© Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP Pool/dpa
In the spring, Elon Musk was one of the signatories of a call to suspend the development of artificial intelligence for six months. Six months later, his AI company releases its own chatbot called Grok.
Tech billionaire’s AI start-up X.Ai Elon Musk is competing with ChatGPT with his own chatbot. The software called Grok is initially only available to some users in the USA. As a prerequisite, they must be subscription customers of Musk’s online platform
Grok gets information from X posts
The special thing about the chatbot is that it 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 “piquant” questions that would be rejected by most other systems based on artificial intelligence.
Musk, who himself represents the political views of the American right, has long accused other tech companies of being, in his view, too politically correct and restricting freedom of speech. After taking over Twitter, he relaxed the rules on speech tolerated by the platform. Because many companies fear a negative environment for their brands, Twitter and X’s advertising revenue halved after the acquisition.
Experts see danger in uncontrolled training of an AI
Many experts, however, see the danger in exactly the opposite way – and warn that AI systems such as chatbots can too easily slip into racist, homophobic or otherwise discriminatory statements. This may be due, for example, to the abundance of data with which they are trained.
AI chatbots like 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 using huge amounts of text.
Musk was once involved in founding OpenAI, but then withdrew. The tech entrepreneur and head of the electric car manufacturer Tesla criticizes the fact that OpenAI is now profit-oriented instead of its original non-profit intentions. Grok was launched over the weekend ahead of an OpenAI developer conference where new features are expected.
Elon Musk called for a pause in the development of AI
Musk has been warning for years that artificial intelligence could be 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 (you can find out more here). However, his intentions were quickly called into question after word spread that his own AI company, X.AI, was founded around the same time. According to the company, the chatbot Grok was developed within around four months. Regarding the vision of X.AI, Musk previously said, among other things, that the software should understand the nature of the universe.