Grok is off to a controversial but interesting start

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Controversial. Funny. Useful. Those are just some of the words you could use to describe the much-anticipated launch of Grok, the ‘spicy’ AI chatbot from Elon Musk that was created because ChatGPT is “too woke“ (Musk’s words, not mine).

But hilarity, controversy, and genuine use cases emerged over the weekend as the launch of the chatbot brought many surprises.

TODAY’S MENU

• The Grok Launch — Everything you need to know

• The beginner’s guide to writing ChatGPT prompts

• Infographic: The jobs most exposed to AI, by industry

• 5 new AI tools to boost your productivity

• Meme of the day: Grok passes the humor test

• AI Generated Images: A Star Wars Christmas

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Accusations, jokes, joy and surprises. Key highlights from Grok’s launch:

It wouldn’t be an Elon Musk product if it didn’t have some element of controversy. And Grok’s launch was no different. Here’s what went down as the much-anticipated chatbot from xAI and Musk went live.

Designed to be less ‘woke’ than ChatGPT, Grok might funnily be even more left-leaning in its views

After teasers and previews of answers filled with swear words and jokes, the last thing anyone would have expected Grok to be is even more politically left-leaning than ChatGPT. In fact, part of Grok’s origin story is Elon Musk building an alternative chatbot to counter ChatGPT, which Musk called “too woke.“

After several tweets accused Grok of being woke, research scientist David Rozado added even more fuel to the fire by posting a study labeling Grok as even more left and libertarian-leaning than ChatGPT:

Elon Musk seemed to admit partially to the finding as he commented: “That chart exaggerates the situation imo, but we are taking immediate action to shift Grok closer to politically neutral.”

Access to real-time tweets does give Grok an advantage over ChatGPT when it comes to some prompts

While it might not be as capable as GPT-4, Grok does seem to provide new and unique value in the form of up-to-date information that it pulls from user tweets. Bindu Reddy, CEO of Abacus AI, found that Grok outperformed both ChatGPT and Bard when asked about the latest news on AI.

The ability to use the latest information in generating answers opens up a whole new set of use cases like searching and summarizing the latest news, or using the latest information to create new content like blogs and social media posts.

Controversy as some question whether Grok is pulling from OpenAI’s codebase

A Grok screenshot from X user Jax Winterbourne implied that Grok might be pulling from OpenAI’s codebase. The controversy escalated as the official ChatGPT account reposted the same screenshot with the description: “we have a lot in common,” potentially indicating that this was true.

Musk responded to the post with “Well, son, since you scraped all the data from this platform for your training, you ought to know.“

While it’s not entirely clear why Grok generated that response, Igor Babuschkin from xAI replied to the screenshot with: “The issue here is that the web is full of ChatGPT outputs, so we accidentally picked up some of them when we trained Grok on a large amount of web data.“ He further clarified that “no OpenAI code was used to make Grok.“

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AI AT WORK

The beginner’s guide to creating prompts for ChatGPT

INFOGRAPHIC

The jobs most exposed to AI, by industry

The Department of Eduction in the UK looked at the impact of AI on jobs and found that Finance, insurance and IT were among the industries where jobs were most exposed to AI:

The industry estimate of exposure to AI is constructed by taking a weighted average of the AI Occupational Exposure (AIOE) scores across occupations within an industry.

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RESEARCH

A new technique can accelerate language models by 300x

Researchers at ETH Zurich have devised a method for dramatically speeding up neural networks, notably in language models such as BERT and GPT-3. They greatly lower the computational load by incorporating "fast feedforward" layers that use conditional matrix multiplication, allowing for quicker and more efficient processing.

This development, which has the potential to speed up language models by over 300 times, might lead to more efficient AI systems. For humans, this implies faster, more accessible AI tools, which will improve applications such as language translation, content production and data analysis, making sophisticated AI more accessible and less resource-intensive.

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5 AI Tools to Supercharge Your Productivity

Strut AI: The all-in-one AI workspace for writers. Capture projects, notes, drafts, and more in collaborative workspaces using AI.

Streak: Help your team make informed decisions using AI-powered data entry, precise insights, and tailored suggestions.

Expertzz (sponsored): Get the best and only ChatGPT course you will ever need. Lifetime access to future updates. Grab instant access now.

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MEME OF THE DAY

ChatGPT passes the humor test

AI-GENERATED IMAGES

Star Wars Christmas

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