xAI announced upgrading Grok, its chatbot, with enhanced reasoning in math-related tasks and expanding contextual logic in overall performance.

xAI reports that the latest version of Grok will make it catch up with other top-ranking chatbots in the market and surpass them in many benchmarks.

According to xAI:

"One of the most major improvements of Grok-1.5 is about its performance on coding and math-related tasks. The Grok-1.5 scored 50.6% on the MATH benchmark and 90% on the GSM8K benchmark, two of the math benchmarks that cover quite a broad spectrum of competition problems from grade school through high school. It scores 74.1% on the HumanEval benchmark, which tests code generation and problem-solving capabilities."

So Grok should answer tasks better, quicker on many topics. And at the same time, I would appreciate knowing data on the actual number of people currently using Grok.

The AI assistant was rolled out last November as a version of X's rival ChatGPT, which lets users ask it questions and get generated responses.
What's more, you can put Grok in "Fun Mode" and get even sassier responses, which Elon and Co. are convinced is a differentiating feature.

Well, that and Grok isn't "woke," while all other AI chatbots are, according to Musk; Grok is also the only chatbot powered by real-time posts on X, which should give it an advantage in up-to-the-minute context, etc.

So, in theory Grok should be better on certain tasks than other chatbots, but then, Grok doesn't even have the same compute power as ChatGPT or Gemini or Meta's Llama-powered models.

So is Grok any good?

Well, we really don't know, as access to Grok up until now has been confined to X Premium+ subscribers, of which there are very few.

X Premium overall has less than a million subscribers, and that is inclusive of all the people paying $8 and $3 per month for the regular and basic packages. Few are paying $16 per month for the top-tier Premium+, and as such, there are not a lot people that can even access the bot to share their experience.

X hopes to flip this on its head, making Grok available to all Premium subscribers, while it is gifting Premium to very heavily followed users.

Ideally, that will kick off the Grok hype train and maybe bring people into the chatbot. More usage, however also shines a light on more errors and issues and can reveal weaknesses in the Grok system, too.

Which we've witnessed with every other chatbot. ChatGPT suffered through several major bugs it needed to have codes for, while Gemini's pursuit of maximizing diversity in answers created many inaccuracies and issues. Meta's AI tools have also been exposed to "contentious" questions, and much of that has come from expanded access and use.

This will most likely translate to Grok feeling the same way. We have yet to see this type of issue arise with the tool up until this point as only a few individuals are allowed to access it.

This will not be for long and will be rather interesting in how Grok and X will react to these types of concerns that have arisen regarding the tool.
However, Grok must also start generating revenue at the same time. According to reports, xAI spent hundreds of millions of dollars buying hardware for the project. It aimed to directly compete with OpenAI, especially, in the AI race.

Because Elon's mad they did not want him to be their CEO. After going in early and investing as an early participant, Musk offered to come in to take over the role as chief, and OpenAI declined. At that point, OpenAI became a for-profit, and then Musk is livid, because they'd taken all his initial funding for that company and had never re-paid him for it either, but denied him further.

So now, he wants xAI, and Grok, to beat OpenAI. But to do that, Grok also needs to bring in users, and revenue.
 
Which it's not yet.
 
Will these new expansions change that?
 
xAI says that Grok-1.5 will be made available very soon.