Elon Musk’s AI “Grok” humorously clashes with Sam Altman’s Chat GPT-4, sparking a unique tech CEO rivalry.
Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and The Boring Company, recently launched his new artificial intelligence (AI) system named “Grok.” While Grok didn’t significantly impact the machine learning community, it caught the attention of Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, the organization behind ChatGPT. Altman took to the social media platform X, previously known as Twitter, to make a playful jab at Grok’s capabilities, likening them to those of a grandpa making jokes.
Responding in his characteristic style, Musk claimed that Grok crafted a comeback, humorously linking GPT-4 to the word “snore” and referencing an outdated joke about a screen door on a submarine. Grok’s reply seemed to veer off into a more aggressive tone, criticizing OpenAI’s sense of humor and suggesting that GPT-4 lacks the ability to understand jokes.
This exchange between two tech CEOs lacks the subtlety and sophistication of historic Silicon Valley rivalries, like Bill Gates versus Steve Jobs, but it certainly adds a layer of uniqueness to current tech industry disputes.
The Backstory and the Battle of AI Humor
Altman and Musk share a history as co-founders of OpenAI. Musk departed from the company before it reached its current success, valued at two billion dollars, largely thanks to its GPT-3 and GPT-4 models. Recently, Musk joined others in calling for a pause in AI development, citing concerns about AI’s potential dangers. However, six months later, Musk’s company X introduced Grok, claiming it surpasses ChatGPT in performance.
Grok is designed to produce humorous content, taking inspiration from Douglas Adams’ “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” renowned for its clever, witty humor. This launch directly challenges OpenAI’s recent GPT-4 release, which features customizable ChatGPT personalities.
The competition between Grok and GPT-4 focuses on their humor and robustness, though there are no established benchmarks for evaluating these qualities in large language models (LLMs). While OpenAI has released research papers detailing ChatGPT’s capabilities, X has yet to provide similar evidence for Grok, beyond claims of it outperforming an older version of ChatGPT.