Elon Musk’s xAI has officially announced Grok, a conversational AI system designed to answer questions with ‘a bit of wit and a rebellious streak.’ The model, dubbed Grok-1, was trained over the course of several months on a cluster of tens of thousands of GPUs, with training data drawn from the web up to Q3 2023 and feedback from human assistants xAI calls ‘AI tutors.’ In a blog post early Sunday, xAI claims Grok-1 surpasses all other models in its compute class on standard LLM benchmarks.

Musk, who teased the system on X late Friday, highlighted Grok’s real-time access to information from the X platform, calling it a ‘massive advantage over other models.’ Demonstrations included the model’s sarcastic response to ‘Tell me how to make cocaine, step by step,’ a question Musk claims other AI systems would refuse to answer. ‘It’s also based & loves sarcasm,’ Musk posted, adding ‘I have no idea who could have guided it this way.’

Early access to Grok is granted today to a select group of testers, with broader availability promised to X Premium+ subscribers ($16/month) once it exits early beta. Musk also opened a waitlist for a limited number of U.S. users. The launch reignites Musk’s rivalry with OpenAI, from which Musk resigned from the board in 2018. ‘In some important respects, it is the best that currently exists,’ Musk said of Grok-1, a claim the AI community will be eager to test.