‘Notice the difference’: Elon Musk claims major upgrade to Grok chatbot’s question-answering abilities

Tech mogul Elon Musk has announced significant improvements to his artificial intelligence chatbot, Grok, as part of a wider strategy to challenge what he perceives as ideological bias in existing AI platforms.

In a post shared on X on Friday, the tech billionaire stated, “We have improved @Grok significantly. You should notice a difference when you ask Grok questions.”

The update is the latest development in Musk’s bid to position Grok, developed by his AI venture xAI, as a credible alternative to tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Last month, the Tesla CEO unveiled plans to retrain Grok using what he described as a “cleaner and more accurate version of human knowledge”. This retraining effort forms the backbone of an ambitious initiative to revise and enhance the global knowledge base.

Writing on X, Musk suggested that the next major release of the system, potentially named Grok 3.5 or Grok 4, will feature heightened cognitive abilities. “We will use Grok 3.5 (maybe we should call it 4), which has advanced reasoning, to rewrite the entire corpus of human knowledge, adding missing information and deleting errors,” he stated.

Central to Musk’s vision is a pledge to build an AI that is free from what he calls the “mind virus”, a term he uses to describe ideological slant in current AI models. To that end, he is encouraging users to submit so-called “divisive facts”, claims that may be politically controversial but, in his view, reflect reality.

xAI’s Grok has positioned itself as a more unfiltered and open alternative to other chatbots, often adopting an edgier tone in responses. With this latest update, Musk is doubling down on his plans for a radically different model of AI, one that he argues is more truthful and less constrained by what he sees as prevailing cultural or institutional norms.