The first product from Elon Musk-led xAI was announced on Friday, and the CEO has suggested that Tesla’s vehicles may natively run a smaller version of the AI assistant.
On Saturday, X user and Tesla enthusiast Chuck Cook spotted that Musk liked a post saying that a smaller, quantized version of the AI model Grōk would run natively on Tesla with local computing power. Following Cook’s mention, Musk noted that Teslas will likely come with the largest amount of usable inference compute in the world — as long as the vehicles’ AI computer can run the Grōk model.
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.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 4, 2023
Exactly what applications Grōk will have on Tesla are unclear, but some have noted that it could be used in place of the company’s current voice command system. The post that Musk liked mentioned this and that the SuperPrompt context window in Grok may have a limit of 25,000 characters, adding that the model will first look to X for live content access.
Additionally, xAI is reportedly planning an application programming interface (API) for Grōk, and the model is also expected to have both audio and image recognition.
The news comes after Musk announced that Grōk will be provided to X users who subscribe to the company’s Premium Plus tier, starting at $16 a month. It also comes just a few months after Musk launched the OpenAI competitor xAI, officially marking the company’s first software release.
Musk said on Friday that subscribers would get access to the software “as soon as it’s out of early beta.” On Saturday, xAI and Musk officially announced Grōk, which is now being offered to X Premium Plus users and is detailed on the company’s website.
Announcing Grok!
Grok is an AI modeled after the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, so intended to answer almost anything and, far harder, even suggest what questions to ask!
Grok is designed to answer questions with a bit of wit and has a rebellious streak, so please don’t use…
— xAI (@xai) November 5, 2023
The company’s jobs web page also hosts four different job listings for working at the company: AI engineering and researching, data engineering and web crawling, full stack web engineering, and infrastructure engineering.
In August, the xAI account on X posted that it was hiring creators, teachers and curators to help improve the company’s models, adding that those who are extremely good at writing and are experts in their fields should direct message (DM) the account.
Update 11/5/23: Added xAI and Musk’s official announcement of the AI model.
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