Elon Musk’s xAI introduces its first multimodal model ‘Grok-1.5 Vision’ in race to better compete with OpenAI

Ira Singh
Khabar Khabaron Ki,17 April’24

Elon Musk’s pioneering artificial intelligence company, xAI, has taken a significant leap forward with the introduction of its latest multimodal model, Grok-1.5 Vision (Grok-1.5V). This cutting-edge model promises to revolutionize the way AI systems understand and process both text and visuals, marking a significant milestone in the field of artificial intelligence.

Experts in the AI community have hailed Grok-1.5V as a groundbreaking development, highlighting its potential to drive innovation and accelerate progress in areas such as natural language understanding, computer vision, and information retrieval. By combining advanced techniques from both text and image processing, Grok-1.5V represents a significant step forward in the quest to create AI systems that can truly understand and interact with the world in a human-like manner.

According to sources familiar with the matter, Grok-1.5V will initially be made available only to a select group of early testers and existing users of xAI’s Grok platform. This exclusive rollout strategy is aimed at gathering feedback and fine-tuning the model before it is made more widely accessible to the broader AI community.

A look at Grok 1.5 vision
The company explained that they have found seven examples showcasing Grok-1.5V’s potential. Grk-1.5 V’s can transform a whiteboard sketch of a flowchart into Python code. It could also generate a bedtime story from a kid’s drawing to explain a meme.In addition the new model can also convert a table into a CSV file format identifying if your deck has rotten wood and needs replacing.
“Grok-1.5V is competitive with existing frontier multimodal models in a number of domains, ranging from multi- disciplinary reasoning to understanding documents, science diagrams, charts, screenshots, and photographs,” Musk explained.

The Future Ahead
From what it is understood, Musk’s AI company continues to upgrade itself and works to keep up with OpenAI and other market leaders. This is expected to have started since its chatbot first hit the scene in November 2023. Experts highlighted that Grok-1.5V came within less than a month after xAI made its Grok AI open source

Critics argue Grok chatbot has faced a lot of controversy. In early April researchers mentioned that the Grok chatbot could instruct users on criminal activities. Moreover, xAI plans to build “beneficial [artificial general intelligence]”. The new model is expected to be capable of understanding the universe. It reveals thatFurthermore, Grok highlights that “significant” updates will be made to Grok AI’s multimodal by understanding the next generation capabilities in the coming months.

The startup has come a long way very fast since it launched in July 2023. At the time, Musk said he was launching the company in response to the “black box” approach of AI developers such as OpenAI and Google, which are very secretive about how their AI models work. Musk said the goal is to create AI that’s more transparent and accountable than its competitors’ work.