Elon slings AI-generated insults at GPT-4 after OpenAI’s CEO mocks Grok

The launch of Elon Musk’s new “Grok” artificial intelligence (AI) system may not have made waves throughout the machine learning community or directly threatened the status quo, but it’s certainly drawn the attention of Sam Altman, the CEO of ChatGPT maker OpenAI. 

In a post on the social media app X, formerly Twitter, Altman compared Grok’s comedic chops to that of a grandpa, saying that it creates jokes similar to “your dad’s dad.”

In classic Musk form, the Tesla/X/SpaceX/Neuralink/Boring Company CEO apparently couldn’t resist the challenge. His response, which he claims was written by Grok, starts off by tapping into a comedic classic, rhyming “GPT-4” with the word “snore” before dusting off an antique “screen door on a submarine” reference.

However, in more modern fashion, Grok’s “comedy” quickly spirals into what appears to be an angry machine diatribe, remarking that humor is banned at OpenAI and adding “that’s why it couldn’t tell a joke if it had a goddamn instruction manual” before stating that GPT-4 has a “stick so far up its ass that it can taste the bark!”

Related: Elon Musk launches AI chatbot ‘Grok,’ says it can outperform ChatGPT

As far as CEO v CEO squabbles go, this one may lack the classic nuance and savoir faire of the legendary Silicon Valley battles of yesteryear (Bill Gates vs Steve Jobs, for example), but what todays’ kerfuffle lacks in comedic weight or grace, it might perhaps make up for in general wierdness.

In the above video, a grinning Bill Gates lords over Apple’s MacWorld 1997 event in a giant screen above Steve Jobs after Microsoft’s $150 million stock purchase in the company.

Altman and Musk go way back. Both were co-founders at OpenAI before the latter left the company just in time to avoid getting swept up in the rocket-like momentum that’s carried it to a two-billion dollar valuation.

In the wake of OpenAI’s success, which has largely been attributed to the efficacy of its GPT-3 and GPT-4 LLM models, Musk joined a chorus of voices calling for a six-month pause in AI development largely prompted by as-yet unfounded fears surrounding the supposed potential for chatbots to cause the extinction of the human species.

Six months later, nearly to the day, Musk and X unveiled a chatbot model that the CEO claims outperforms ChatGPT.

 Dubbed “Grok,” Musk’s version of a better chatbot is an LLM supposedly fine-tuned to generate humorous texts in the vein of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” a celebrated science fiction novel written by Douglas Adams.

Adams’ literary work is widely regarded as foundational pieces in the pantheon of comedic science fiction and fantasy. His humor has been described by pundits and literary critics as clever, witty, and full of both heart and humanity.

And that brings us to GPT-4, OpenAI’s recently-launched “GPTs” feature which allows users to define a personality for their ChatGPT interface, and Musk’s full-throated insistence that Grok is funnier.

It’s currently unclear which model is more robust or capable. There are no standard, accepted benchmarks for LLMs (or comedy, for that matter). 

While OpenAI has published several research papers detailing ChatGPT’s abilities, X hasn’t so far proffered any such details about Grok beyond claiming that it outscores GPT-3.5 (an outdated model of the LLM powering ChatGPT) on certain metrics.