Elon Musk’s Artificial Intelligence Startup xAI Will Merge With X After Releasing ‘Rebellious’ Grok Chatbot

Topline

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI will be merged with his social platform and aspirant everything app X, the billionaire said on Sunday, a day after the company launched its much-anticipated first product in an effort to rival popular AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard.

Key Facts

News Peg

On Friday, Musk said xAI was gearing up to unveil its first AI model with a view to rival industry leaders like Google and OpenAI and their popular AI chatbots Bard and ChatGPT. The bot, named Grok and modeled after the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, was launched as a “very early beta product” to X’s paid subscribers a day later. xAI said Grok “is designed to answer questions with a bit of wit and has a rebellious streak” and encouraged users to steer clear if they “hate humor.” Musk has said the Grok bot has a “massive advantage” over other AI models like ChatGPT as it has “real-time access” to the X platform. While the companies share similar names—the letter “x” is common through Musk’s work—and share a leader, they remain distinct entities. On its website, xAI said it is separate from X Corp—the company Musk legally changed Twitter’s name to earlier this year—but will “work closely with X (Twitter), Tesla, and other companies to make progress towards our mission.”

Tangent

Grok’s debut comes just months after Musk announced the launch of xAI in July—a few months after it was created—with a mission “to understand the true nature of the universe.” Noting the company’s rapid progress, Musk said xAI’s “compute is doubling every 2 to 3 months.”

Forbes Valuation

$230.9 billion. That’s how much Forbes estimates Musk is worth, placing him at the top of our list of the world’s richest people. Much of Musk’s wealth comes from a cohort of valuable companies he helped found, including automaker Tesla, aeronautics firm SpaceX, brain-computer interface company Neuralink and traffic-busting tunneling firm Boring Company. He was a cofounder and early backer of ChatGPT creator OpenAI when it launched in 2015 but stepped away in 2018, allegedly after a failed takeover attempt.

Further Reading

Elon Musk’s Artificial Intelligence Startup Launching Its First Product Saturday — Here’s What To Know About xAI (Forbes)

Elon Musk’s X Has Started Selling Off Old Twitter Handles For Upwards Of $50,000 (Forbes)