Musk says his new AI chatbot has 'a little humour'

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Last week at the UK's AI summit, Mr Musk conceded there were dangers associated with AI development.

But he has also been a long-standing champion of the technology. He was a co-founder of the firm OpenAI which created ChatGPT, the first AI tool made widely available last year. Microsoft has invested in OpenAI making the tool available on its platform.

Since then Google launched its rival artificial intelligence (AI) model, Bard, and Meta has launched Llama. The tools are designed to use previously ingested information to generate text answers that sound as though a human has written them.

Grok is a term coined by science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein, in his 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land. In it "grokking" was to empathise deeply with others.

However, xAI said Grok was modelled after the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams, which started as a BBC radio series in the 1980s, but was later remade in print and on film.

xAI said Grok was "intended to answer almost anything and, far harder, even suggest what questions to ask".

Grok was a "very early beta product - the best we could do with two months of training", it added.