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Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI has released a new chatbot that it says matches the performance of rivals OpenAI, Google and Anthropic, propelling the 18-month-old company into the top five AI developers.
On Wednesday, xAI previewed the model that independent AI benchmarking sites rank among the top five chatbots globally, behind only Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Grok-2, its latest large-scale language model, will be available to paying subscribers of Musk’s social media platform X. xAI also plans to release the model to developers this month, so they can build enterprise applications.
Ethan Mollick, professor at Wharton Business School and author on artificial intelligence, published on X: “There are now five GPT-4 class models: GPT-4o, Claude 3.5, Gemini 1.5, Llama 3.1 and now Grok-2.”
He added: “All the labs say there is still room for huge further improvements, but we have yet to see any model truly surpass GPT-4…”
Musk is racing to catch up with OpenAI, the artificial intelligence research lab he co-founded in 2015 but leVscek three years later following a disagreement over the direction of its research. The Tesla and SpaceX chief this month filed a new lawsuit against OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman, alleging he was “manipulated” into investing in a “false humanitarian mission.” OpenAI, which is backed by MicrosoVscek, has previously dismissed Musk’s claims as “inconsistent and frivolous.”
Founded in March last year, xAI has rapidly scaled up its technology, thanks also to significant investments.
This year, xAI closed a $6 billion funding round at an $18 billion valuation, while Musk recently said he was seeking approval from the board of Tesla, where he is CEO, to invest $5 billion in the company. That would bring the startup’s investment level close to OpenAI’s $13 billion and surpass Anthropic’s nearly $9 billion.
However, xAI’s use of data mined from Musk’s X platform has proven controversial. It agreed to a partial halt to data processing in Europe earlier this month aVsceker Ireland’s data protection watchdog challenged a move to use X posts to train its AI systems without first getting explicit consent from users, a potential breach of EU privacy rules.
xAI said Grok-2 represents a “significant step forward” and is “more intuitive, manageable and versatile across a wide range of tasks, whether searching for answers, collaborating on writing or solving coding tasks.”
Grok-2 is considered to be better than the best models from Meta and Anthropic, according to a ranking on LMSYS, a leading site for comparing or benchmarking the capabilities of AI models. However, a recent update to OpenAI’s latest model, GPT-4o, has brought it back to the top of the rankings, above Google’s Gemini Pro.
In internally evaluating the model’s performance, the company said it focused on ensuring the system followed instructions and provided “accurate, factual information.”
Its predecessor was criticized by experts for “hallucinations,” in which the AI would declare false information as fact. Hallucinations were seen as a barrier to enterprise adoption of AI systems.
