Elon Musk's AI startup, X.AI, recently introduced its chatbot called "Grok." This launch coincided with an OpenAI developer conference, where Grok will be competing with ChatGPT.

However, Grok is initially only available to some users in the U.S. As a prerequisite, they have to be subscription customers of Musk's online platform X, formerly known as Twitter, in the most expensive tier, which costs $16 per month in the U.S. and about 19 euros ($20.43) per month in Germany.

The chatbot has direct access to current information from X, explained the startup X.AI at the launch of the software at the weekend. Grok also answers questions of a more provocative nature that are rejected by most other systems based on artificial intelligence.

AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, which was developed by the startup OpenAI, can formulate texts at the linguistic level of a human. The principle behind this is that they estimate word by word how a sentence should continue. The models are trained with massive amounts of text.

Musk himself was once involved in the founding of OpenAI, but then withdrew. The tech entrepreneur and head of electric car manufacturer Tesla criticized the fact that OpenAI is now profit-oriented instead of its original nonprofit intentions.

Musk has been warning for years that artificial intelligence could become dangerous for humanity. In the spring, he was one of the signatories of an open letter calling for the development of software with AI to be paused for six months in order to create a regulatory framework during this time.

However, his motives were quickly called into question after it became known that his own AI company, X.AI, was founded around the same time. According to the company, the Grok chatbot was developed in around four months. Musk previously said that X.AI's vision was for the software to understand the nature of the universe.