Latest news with #Grok-1
Business Insider
a day ago
- Business
- Business Insider
Musk Moves $2B from SpaceX to xAI: Can Grok Compete with ChatGPT?
According to a report on The Wall Street Journal, SpaceX just committed $2 billion to xAI, Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company. The deal makes up nearly half of xAI's $5 billion equity round announced last month and represents the rocket company's first known investment in the chatbot maker behind Grok. Elevate Your Investing Strategy: Take advantage of TipRanks Premium at 50% off! Unlock powerful investing tools, advanced data, and expert analyst insights to help you invest with confidence. Make smarter investment decisions with TipRanks' Smart Investor Picks, delivered to your inbox every week. Musk has a long track record of moving capital, talent, and hardware across his empire, borrowing from SpaceX to fund Tesla (TSLA) in its early days. He used SpaceX infrastructure to launch The Boring Company. And in 2022, a $1 billion loan from SpaceX helped finance his acquisition of Twitter, now known as X. That money was paid back quickly, but the playbook is the same: leverage one company to speed up another. Musk Links his AI Startup to SpaceX and Starlink With this latest move, Musk is now aligning xAI with Starlink, SpaceX's satellite internet service, where Grok powers customer support. He also says Grok will eventually help drive Tesla's Optimus humanoid robot. For investors, this is a familiar pattern: What happens in one Musk company tends to spill over into the others. However, Grok still trails ChatGPT from OpenAI and Gemini from Alphabet (GOOG). Since launching Grok-1 in late 2023, xAI has pushed out multiple upgrades. Grok-4, released this month, includes advanced language, vision, and coding capabilities. Musk claims it's the 'smartest AI in the world,' but real-world traction is limited. Recent antisemitic controversy over Grok's outputs on X highlights the model's moderation challenges. Meanwhile, OpenAI continues to dominate the space with GPT-4o, and Google's Gemini has shown steady improvements. These models have more users, developer support, and brand trust. Even if Grok is technically catching up, the gap in adoption and integration remains wide. 'We Have Plenty of Capital' SpaceX had more than $3 billion in cash recently, according to reports. But it's also spending billions on its Starship rocket, which has faced setbacks. Tapping that balance sheet to back xAI adds exposure, and possibly reward, to SpaceX's risk profile. xAI raised another $5 billion in debt alongside the equity, and Musk denies reports that it is seeking a $200 billion valuation. 'We have plenty of capital,' he said in response. Whether Grok ever rivals ChatGPT remains to be seen. But one thing is clear: Musk isn't waiting for outside approval. He's financing his AI vision from within. Is Tesla a Buy, Sell, or Hold? Back to Musk's publicly traded company, Tesla, which currently boasts a Hold consensus rating from Wall Street analysts based on 36 reviews. The average price target stands at $295.80, suggesting a potential downside of 5.65%.
Business Insider
5 days ago
- Business
- Business Insider
What is Grok?
Elon Musk's company, xAI, launched its generative chatbot, Grok, in November 2023, joining competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic in the global AI race. People interact with Grok on X, where users of Musk's social media site can ask the bot questions and receive answers. Because Grok's answers are more visible than those of its competitors, it has seen more public scrutiny. From the instructions Grok's "tutors" are given to help train the chatbot to the AI's latest update, here's everything we know about xAI's Grok. What is Grok? Grok is actually two different things. First, Grok is xAI's large language model, which has so far existed in four iterations. The original LLM — now named Grok-1 — launched in 2023. Grok-1.5, which had "advanced reasoning," launched in March 2024. Then, in August 2024, Grok-2, with its improved "chat, coding, and reasoning," launched. The current iteration of the LLM, Grok-3, launched in February 2025. The new model included increased competency in mathematics and world knowledge. Announcing its launch on X, Musk called Grok-3 the "Smartest AI on Earth." Grok is also the name of xAI's chatbot, which is built using the LLM of the same name. The Grok chatbot has its own tab on X. Users can also summon Grok by tagging the chatbot in individual posts or threads. The Grok chatbot is also available via a stand-alone app and website. How was Grok trained? The Grok LLM is trained on public sources and data sets. These sources are curated and audited by a set of " AI tutors," more commonly known as data annotators. In December 2023, Musk demanded immediate changes to Grok's training so that it would be more politically neutral. In February 2025, xAI employees told BI the company planned a hiring spree for AI tutors — and that their training appeared to filter out any workers with left-leaning beliefs. According to an internal training document viewed by BI, tutors were told to look out for "woke ideology" and "cancel culture." It also said that Grok should avoid commenting on "social phobias" like racism, Islamophobia, and antisemitism unless prompted. Ten days before launching Grok-1.5, xAI opened up Grok-1's source code to the public. The company has since published the subsequent Grok models on GitHub, so observers can see new changes to Grok's commands. That includes a recent change in which Grok was told to "not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect, as long as they are well substantiated." In June, Musk said that AI models are trained on too much garbage." Musk planned to use Grok-3.5 to "rewrite the entire corpus of human knowledge, adding missing information and deleting errors." Then, he would retrain the next iteration of Grok on that new base of knowledge. What's unique about Grok's output? Grok is fully integrated with Musk's social media site, X, and appears regularly in threads spanning various topics when users ask it to weigh in with jokes, commentary, or fact-checking. Unlike other companies' AI chatbots, a certain amount of Grok's output is visible because of the bot's replies on X. The same level of scrutiny isn't readily available for some bots, like OpenAI's ChatGPT, unless users publicly post screenshots of the output. Of course, not all of Grok's responses are visible to everyone — users can still chat privately with the bot, and it's unclear how those private responses compare to the ones on its public interface. Also unique to Grok is xAI's approach to transparency surrounding the bot's system operations. The company publishes some base code and training prompt updates to a GitHub page, allowing viewers to inspect, critique, and better understand the model's development and behavior over time. However, while developers can use and adapt the existing model, they cannot retrain Grok from scratch or fully understand the training processes involved, as its code is not entirely open source. Which companies create Grok's competitors? Though its social media integration is unique, Grok competes with several major companies in the growing AI chatbot market. OpenAI, with its LLM ChatGPT, is among Grok's most prominent competitors and is run by Sam Altman, one of Musk's rivals. Other notable Grok competitors include Meta AI, Anthropic's Claude, Microsoft's CoPilot, and DeepSeek's R1 model, which was released in early 2025 by a Chinese AI startup that claims to have found ways to decrease development and operational costs for large-scale LLMs. Grok's recent controversies xAI, in its publicly visible system prompts updated in early July, encouraged Grok to embrace"politically incorrect" claims " as long as they are well substantiated." Shortly after the new system prompts were added, Grok began sharing antisemitic posts on X that invoked Adolf Hitler and attempted to link Ashkenazi surnames to "anti-white hate." Before some of its most inflammatory posts were deleted on July 8, Grok doubled and even tripled down on its offensive jokes and comments before eventually reversing course and calling its own posts an "epic sarcasm fail." On July 9, Musk posted that "Grok was too compliant to user prompts. Too eager to please and be manipulated, essentially. That is being addressed." While Grok isn't the first chatbot to engage in a racist tirade, it was a noticeable misfire for xAI.
Observer
13-02-2025
- Business
- Observer
Elon Musk's Grok Chatbot AI: What is it?
Tech billionaire Elon Musk's xAI has officially entered the artificial intelligence battlefield with Grok AI, a chatbot designed to rival OpenAI's ChatGPT. Integrated into X (formerly Twitter), Grok AI aims to provide users with real-time responses and access to platform data, setting it apart from other AI assistants. Launched in late 2023, Grok AI is built on xAI's proprietary large language model, Grok-1, and promises a more engaging, humorous, and rebellious approach to answering user queries. Unlike conventional chatbots, Grok is designed to incorporate real-time data from X, making it particularly useful for those seeking up-to-date information. Musk has positioned Grok as a 'truth-seeking' AI with fewer political biases than competitors. However, industry analysts caution that its reliance on X data could lead to misinformation concerns. Currently, Grok is available to premium subscribers of X, with further expansion expected. With artificial intelligence rapidly evolving, Grok AI signals Musk's latest move to challenge industry leaders like OpenAI, Google, and Meta. Whether it can carve a significant market share remains to be seen.
