Grok and roll: will Musk’s AI chatbot rock your conversation?

When, at the beginning of November 2023, Elon Musk announced he was launching Grok, a chatbot to rival ChatGPT and the like, most analysts dismissed it as yet another of his many boutades: chatbots take a long time to develop and train, so what chance could Musk have with a newly founded company of creating something minimally capable of overshadowing companies that had already been working for years on theirs?

Then, in March 2024, Musk announced he was preparing to release Grok’s code and offer it to X premium subscribers. And that is what happened: X ‘s premium subscribers have been able to try Grok out, which aims to set itself apart from the competition, among other things, by having a sense of humor, a feature not universally appreciated.

Why would Musk release Grok’s code? Simple: after suing OpenAI, the company he invested in, accusing it of selling out by ditching its non-profit status, he had to develop a product that at least appeared to be different in that aspect.

Musk has already shown on quite a few occasions how to leverage these types of gestures: he released several Tesla patents to allow other traditional manufacturers to enter the development of the EV, and some of them, in fact, have publicly thanked him. It is, fundamentally, about signaling security in the direction…