xAI Grok can now focus on competition with ChatGPT and Gemini

AI firm xAI has secured $6 billion in funding and could now focus on improving AI chatbot Grok to compete against OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.

During the Spring 2024 Updates event, OpenAI released a new GPT-4o, or “omni” as a new flagship model. It has multimodal AI architecture supporting text, image, and audio inputs to generate output accordingly. Its performance surpasses GPT-4 Turbo for text and coding as well as non-English prompt support.

Other than these performance features, OpenAI demonstrated a new voice mode to conduct real-time conversations using ChatGPT.

Google at I/O 2024 increased Gemini’s context window to 1 million tokens to process huge amounts of information including text, code, and video within a single prompt. The Gemini Pro extends this widow further with 2 million tokens.

The company improved Gemini 1.5 Pro to handle data more carefully and provide fast output to the end-user. It has introduced a new Gemini 1.5 Flash lightweight model for speed and efficiency. Above all, Google shared a sneak peek at Project Astra integration for future AI assistants with Gemini’s data processing capability for natural conversation.

Microsoft also released the newest Copilot at the annual developer conference but uses GPT-4o in the base. Therefore, Google and OpenAI are currently on top of the AI competition. xAI, on the other hand, targets a different audience.

Its Grok chatbot is integrated into social media site X, formerly Twitter. Although, the availability is limited to paid subscriptions the chatbot has garnered a notable user base since its release last November.

The company has a big team of experienced engineers from different backgrounds. Grok has received two major updates in the past two months including v1.5 and 1.5 vision.

The first advances the reasoning and performance of the model over version 1.0. The second provides the ability to process visual data and present it as an output. These two are key aspects of current AI models and should be enhanced with future updates. Meanwhile, xAI must also upstream its game in voice and video generation.

Both Google and OpenAI are harvesting data to train models for these two popular segments of generative AI. In that case, this new AI company is likely to utilize its funding for more research and development of new competitive AI technologies.