Bergur Thormundsson
Research expert covering technology in the Nordics, AI and smart cities
xAI - statistics & facts
One of the more recent additions to the AI competition is xAI, coming into the generative AI competition with its new model, Grök. The release was somewhat of a surprise to the market, as is typical of the man pushing the project, Elon Musk. The founders of xAI include former experts from the likes of OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft, with the company‘s initial goal being to advance mankind's collective understanding of the universe. While it is a separate corporate entity from Musk‘s X platform, it works closely with his other major companies including X (formerly Twitter) and Tesla. This connectivity to other tech companies provides xAI with a considerable leap into the AI competition, allowing it to close the cap faster than other startup companies might.
The X marks the hotspot
Since his buyout of Twitter in 2022, Elon Musk has been near or involved in many major discussions on the tech and global affairs front. This is owed in large part to his holding of the most followed account on X, with over 140 million followers on the platform. Following its eclectic founder, Grök as an AI model is expected to reply with wit, humor, and a combination of sarcasm and a rebellious streak. This sets it apart from many other large language models (LLMs) which are more focused on a neutral and professional response pattern to its users.Grök demonstrates the quality of xAI
Grök, despite being in its early beta stage, is already outperforming a large swathe of its competitors, such as inflection-1 or GPT-3.5. However, it is still not capable enough to challenge the current leaders among the generative AI models, notably Anthropic‘s Claude 2 and OpenAI‘s GPT-4. Despite this, Grök‘s early-stage developmental capability has been considerable, with the model performing exceptionally well at the MMLU benchmark for LLMs. This benchmark is designed to test AI models without them having prior training data in the subject, thus proving their accuracy and capability. It is also likely that Google‘s Gemini program is more sophisticated than Grök, being comparable to OpenAI‘s GPT-4.Tough competition up ahead
While xAI‘s first foray into the generative AI market is looking positive, it is coming up against some of the largest and most titanic tech companies in the world in the form of Google and Microsoft. As a result, xAI will have to leverage all its advantages to succeed, or else risk becoming another footnote in the ongoing generative AI saga.
