Musk’s AI company introduces its chatbot Grok

The special thing about the chatbot is that it has direct access to current information from X, the startup X.AI explained at the launch of the software over the weekend. Your puppy also answers “snarky” questions that most other AI-based systems would dismiss. As a prerequisite, users must be subscription customers of Musk’s online platform

Musk, who himself represents the political views of the American right, has long accused other technology companies of being, in his opinion, too politically correct and restricting freedom of expression. After taking over Twitter, he relaxed the rules of expression allowed by the platform. As many companies fear a negative environment for their brands, Twitter and X’s ad revenues were cut in half after the acquisition.

Warning against discriminatory statements

However, many experts see the danger in just the opposite direction — and warn that AI systems like chatbots could easily slip into racist, homophobic, or otherwise discriminatory statements. This may be due, for example, to the abundance of data on which they were trained.

AI-powered chatbots, such as ChatGPT, developed by startup OpenAI, can craft text at the linguistic level of a human. The principle behind this is that they estimate, word for word, how a sentence should continue. Models are trained using massive amounts of text.

Musk once co-founded OpenAI, but then withdrew. The tech entrepreneur and head of electric car maker Tesla is criticizing the fact that OpenAI is now profit-oriented rather than its original non-profit intentions. Grok was launched over the weekend ahead of the OpenAI Developer Conference where new features are expected.

Intentions are questionable

Musk has been warning for years that artificial intelligence could pose a danger to humanity. In the spring, he was a signatory to an open letter calling for a pause on AI software development for six months in order to create a regulatory framework during this period.

However, his intentions soon came into question after news broke that he was founding his own artificial intelligence company, X.AI, around the same time. According to the company, chatbot Grok was developed in about four months. Regarding the vision for X.AI, Musk has previously said, among other things, that the software must understand the nature of the universe.