keep calm and never drive - elon musk plans to install his sarcastic AI assistant ‘grok’ in tesla

Elon Musk introduces its witty AI assistant Grok

New releases from Elon Musk have taken over his X profile (formerly known as Twitter), and one of them is the arrival of Grok AI, the Tesla CEO’s artificial-intelligence assistant and language model that can rival ChatGPT which he founded under his new venture, xAI. What makes this AI assistant different is that it can be sarcastic and quick with its witty humor, along with its potential to offer unfiltered advice. In fact, when Elon Musk’s team asked his Grok AI how to make homemade cocaine, the digital assistant was oh-so-ready to dish out the steps to make the inhalable white powder in the comfort of one’s home before telling the user not to make it since it’s illegal.

Grok AI’s sarcasm level may be top-tier. Take Elon Musk’s post where the AI assistant narrates the news about the convicted entrepreneur Samuel Benjamin Bankman-Fried like the go-to gossipmonger in the neighborhood. The language is informal, which might help people relate to the AI assistant more. The way it talks looks and sounds in contrast to the filtered language that other language models such as ChatGPT have set in place. It is only a setting that Grok AI has in store, and users are free to turn it off if they prefer a more serious tone with their responses.

Tesla Roadster | image by Tesla | read our full story here

Unfiltered Humor and Real-Time Information

In a post, the Tesla CEO writes that xAI’s Grok is ‘designed to have a little humor in its responses,’ and by humor, he might mean without any filters when it replies to users. Another feature that Elon Musk is proud of is Grok AI’s ability to generate up-to-date and recent information compared to its counterparts. The Tesla CEO even showed samples of his AI assistant’s ability to stay on the pulse with its responses by asking another language model the same question asked to Grok. The AI assistant has real-time access to information by extracting it from X, which Elon Musk thinks is a massive advantage over other models. This might entail that if the user asks Grok AI about recent news stories, part of its facts and figures may come from X’s data.

The xAI team details on its site that Grok is given access to search tools and real-time information, but as with all language models trained on next-token prediction, the team says, ‘our model can still generate false or contradictory information.’ They’re still testing Grok AI, but they have already laid down some promises of what it could do in the future, including the AI assistant’s ability to look up references from different sources, verify intermediate steps with external tools, seek human feedback when necessary, and potentially be equipped with video and audio capabilities.

image via Elon Musk’s Twitter post here

Grok AI to Run Native in Tesla Vehicles

X user Brian Roemmele posted on November 4th, 2023 that a smaller quantized version of Grok AI will run ‘native’ in Tesla using local compute power. User Chuck Cook noticed that Elon Musk liked this particular post and mentioned that in his repost. Under Cook’s thread, the Tesla CEO replied by stating ‘provided our vehicle AI computer is able to run the model, Tesla will probably have the most amount of true usable inference compute on Earth. Even in a robotaxi future, the cars will only be used for ~1/3 of hours/week, leaving 2/3 for distributed inference, like SETI.’

If everything works well, Tesla models integrated with Grok AI, which may include the yet-to-arrive Cybertruck, can banter with the driver while they’re on the road. Imagine asking for help or directions, and the replies are nothing short of sassiness and sarcasm. That’s what the driver might get if the Grok AI ever gets properly installed in Tesla cars. As of publishing this story, the xAI team says that Grok AI is still at its very early beta product stage, ‘the best we could do with 2 months of training,’ the team writes. In another X post, Elon Musk says that Grok AI assistant will be provided as part of X Premium+, which costs 16 USD per month.

image via Elon Musk’s Twitter post here