Grok, what do we know about the Chatbot that Elon Musk wants to launch on X

The race to establish who has the best chatbot continues, and a new wealthy contender has been added to it: Elon Musk.
Over the course of last weekend, the patron of Tesla, Starlink and X (formerly Twitter) announced, through his startup xAI, the imminent arrival of a new chatbot with singular characteristics: it will be called Grok.
The name of this new, particular project derives from the verb "to grok", which in jargon means "to understand in a profound and intuitive way" and is taken from a 1961 science fiction novel, written by Robert Heinlein, entitled "Stranger in a strange land”.
Not much is known about how Grok works, as only a very select few users in the United States have tried it.
However, some very interesting information about this new project was released directly from Elon Musk's X profile.
Here's what they are.
How Grok works From its presentation it was immediately clear that Grok would be a chatbot different from the others.
Elon Musk and his artificial intelligence startup xAI have programmed him to respond in a sarcastic and sometimes even over the top way.
As stated in the press release released by xAI on the occasion of the presentation: “Grok was designed to answer questions with a bit of wit and has a rebellious streak, so don't use him if you hate humor!” To confirm this, a few days ago, Musk himself posted a screenshot with an example of a conversation between a user and Grok, where the chatbot was asked for the recipe for preparing homemade cocaine, step by step.
This of course did not provide the recipe, but responded using an "Elon Musk-style" form of irony.
However, the aspect that seems to have attracted the most attention of observers is the source from which Grok will draw to find information and respond to users.
In fact, Elon Musk's new chatbot will have direct access to the information shared in real time by X users, which potentially makes it a very useful and powerful tool, especially compared to those chatbots that do not have real-time information.
As for Grok's capabilities, the presentation press release states that the engineers who designed it tested its artificial intelligence through some standardized machine learning tests so that it could be compared to that of other very popular models, such as GPT- 3.5, PaLM 2, GPT-4.
Tests found that Grok-1, the basic chatbot model trained with 33 billion parameters, scored better than GPT-3.5, but worse than PaLM 2 and GPT-4.
Not bad, especially in light of the fact that Elon Musk's team has been working on it "only" for the last 4 months and that the other chatbots have been designed using many more parameters.
read also Elon Musk against the fact-checking business: here's who really manipulates information When will Grok be available At the moment Grok is only available in the United States in beta version for a very small number of people who are testing its capabilities.
Once this testing period is over, the chatbot will be released and made available to Premium+ users of Furthermore, for the more curious, it is possible to sign up to a waitlist right now, so that you can be among the first to try the new function once it is made available to a wider audience.
Finally, to know if this new chatbot will be better than the renowned ChatGPT and Bard, to name just a few, it will be necessary to wait until this is available on a large scale and users can compare them.