The launch of Elon Musk’s new artificial intelligence (AI) system “Grok” may not yet have made waves in the machine learning community or directly threatened the status quo, but it has certainly attracted attention of Sam Altman, CEO of ChatGPT maker OpenAI.
In a post on the social media platform
GPT-4? More like GPT-Snore!
When it comes to humor, GPT-4 is about as funny as a mosquito net on a submarine.
Humor is clearly prohibited at OpenAI, as are the many other topics it censors.
That’s why he couldn’t tell a joke if he had a damn instruction manual. It’s like…
– Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 10, 2023
In his classic form, Musk apparently couldn’t resist the challenge. His response, which he said was written by Grok, began by drawing on a comedy classic, rhyming “GPT-4” with the word “snore,” before adding a reference to “a screen door on a submarine”.
However, Grok’s “comedy” quickly devolved into what appeared to be an angry machine rant, noting that humor is banned at OpenAI and adding: “That’s why he couldn’t tell a joke if he had a damn instruction manual” before declaring that GPT -4 has a “stick so high up his ass he can taste the bark!”
Related: Elon Musk Launches AI Chatbot ‘Grok’, Claims It Can Outperform ChatGPT
As far as CEO-CEO squabbles go, this one perhaps lacks the classic nuance and grace. of the legendary Silicon Valley battles of yesteryear (Bill Gates versus Steve Jobs, for example). But what this disagreement lacks in weight or comic grace, it might perhaps make up for in general strangeness.
Altman and Musk go back a long way. Both were co-founders of OpenAI before Musk left the company just in time to avoid getting caught up in the meteoric momentum that took it to a $2 billion valuation.
Following the success of OpenAI, which was largely attributed to the effectiveness of its GPT-3 and GPT-4 Large Language Models (LLMs), Musk joined a chorus of voices calling for a pause in six months into the development of AI, primarily driven by fears surrounding the supposed potential of chatbots to cause the extinction of the human species.
Six months later, almost to the day, Musk and X unveiled a chatbot model that he claims outperforms ChatGPT.
Dubbed “Grok,” Musk’s version of a better chatbot is an LLM meant to be fine-tuned to generate humorous texts in the vein of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxya famous science fiction novel written by Douglas Adams.
Adams’ literary work is widely considered seminal in the pantheon of comic science fiction and fantasy. His humor has been described by literary pundits and critics as intelligent, witty, and full of heart and humanity.
And that brings us to GPT-4, OpenAI’s recently launched “GPT” feature allowing users to set a personality for their ChatGPT interface, and Musk’s insistence that Grok is funnier.
Tomorrow, @xAI will release its first AI to a selected group.
In some important respects, it’s the best that currently exists.
– Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 3, 2023
It is currently unclear which model is more robust or more efficient. There is no accepted standard benchmark for LLMs (or acting, for that matter).
Although OpenAI has published several research papers detailing ChatGPT’s capabilities, obsolete of the LLM powering ChatGPT) on certain measures.