X Adds New Elements to Its Grok AI Chatbot

X is adding some more elements to its Grok AI chatbot as it continues to push Grok as a value-add to drive X Premium take-up.

First off, X is looking to add customization elements into the Grok experience.

As you can see in this example, posted by X Daily News, users will now be able to add permanent qualifiers into Grok’s process, so that it can use these to better personalize your interactions.

So you could tell Grok about who you are, your preferred names and/or pronouns, your job, your interests, etc. Grok will then be able to build these into its algorithms when providing answers, which could enhance its future responses.

It could be a valuable addition, though it does depend on exactly how much the Grok system will be able to understand and interpret such, and how this is built into its responses. But theoretically, that could make for more personalized chatbot interactions, which could drive more interest in the tool.

X is also looking to add file uploads into the Grok process, so that you can incorporate more elements into your queries.

That’ll provide expanded analytical capacity, and could make Grok a more valuable tool for varying purposes.

It’s difficult to guess how valuable or not Grok will be in the future, because while xAI has gained significant investment, and is being driven by Elon Musk, who has an established reputation for pushing technological development, it’s also going up against significant competition, with Meta, Google, OpenAI and others all aiming for the exact same audience.

Meta says that its chatbot is now the most used AI assistant in the world, while Microsoft has squeezed OpenAI’s tools into every aspect of its apps, bringing them to a huge captive market. OpenAI is also rolling out newer AI assistant tools, like “Operator,” which can conduct web-based tasks on your behalf, and its new deep research tool, which can “analyze, and synthesize hundreds of online sources to create a comprehensive report at the level of a research analyst.”

Each of these chatbots has huge investment, and far bigger reach than xAI at this stage, and it’s difficult to see what sort of differentiators xAI can add to make it stand out and provide more value than these tools.

I mean, being “non woke” has been its key selling point, with Elon railing against the restrictions being put on other AI chatbot tools. But will that be enough to drive significant consumer interest?

And yes, you can already upload files to ChatGPT, and image files to Meta AI, while you can also add in personalization prompts to both, though in less direct ways.

xAI is also in the process of rolling out its dedicated Grok app, which will expand its capacity to cater to different usage needs.

But in pure compute terms, it doesn’t seem to be in the same league.

xAI is powered by its “Colossus” supercomputer cluster, which will eventually incorporate up to 200,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs, a system that came together quickly last year. OpenAI reportedly has access to around 720,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs, via its own and those owned by Microsoft, while Meta now has around 600,000 of its own.

So xAI has a smaller userbase, less compute, and a long way to go to catch up. It seems, then, like its competitors are more likely to win out, but maybe, Elon can find some efficiency that others can’t.

That seems to be what xAI investors are banking on at this stage.