xAI announces Grok, its first chatbot and model

Background

The company announced its first model, Grok-1, and the chatbot built on it, on 3 November 2023. Grok-1 was preceded by a 33-billion-parameter prototype called Grok-0.^[1] A prototype is an early working version used to test a design before the main model is built.

What happened

On 3 November 2023 xAI announced Grok, an AI chatbot powered by its new Grok-1 model.^[1] The company said Grok answers with wit and a “rebellious streak,” and that it has real-time knowledge of the world through the X platform.^[1]

xAI reported that Grok-1 scored 73.0% on MMLU, a test covering exam questions across many subjects, and 63.2% on HumanEval, a test of writing code. It said the model outperformed every model in its compute class, including GPT-3.5.^[1] A compute class is a group of models trained with a similar amount of computing power, so the comparison was among models of comparable cost to build.^[1]

Access began as an early beta for a limited number of US users, who joined through a waitlist. A waitlist is a queue in which people register interest and wait until places open. Early access was limited to paid X Premium users, which meant that the first people to try Grok were subscribers to X's paid tier.^[1][2]

Key details

The announcement said Grok did not yet support vision or audio. Multimodality, which means handling images and sound as well as text, was listed as a research direction for the company.^[1]

The model was preceded by Grok-0, a 33-billion-parameter prototype.^[1]

Impact

The announcement introduced the Grok name to the public. It was the first model and chatbot announced under the Grok name. The early beta and the paid-access rule determined who could try the product at launch.^[1][2] From this announcement onward, the name Grok refers to the chatbot and the model line that followed it.