Elon Musk says Grok 2 due in August, Grok 3 by end of year

Elon Musk, the controversial owner of X (formerly Twitter), has said in X threads that Grok 2 will be landing in August and Grok 3 will arrive by the end of the year. Not too much is known about these upcoming language models but Musk did mention that Grok 3 will be trained on 100,000 Nvidia H100s so "should be really something special".

Musk's reveal of Grok 2's release month was in response to a video of Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez explaining that many models are "training on the model outputs of OpenAI." Gomez said that because Cohere didn't do this with its LLMs, users said something felt different.

In response, Musk agreed with the sentiment in the video and said it takes a lot of work to purge LLMs from the internet training data. He noted that Grok 2 will be "a giant improvement in this regard."

For those unfamiliar with the history of OpenAI, Elon Musk actually co-founded the company but ended up parting ways after disagreements. After the launch of ChatGPT, Musk responded by adding a paid LLM to X called Grok, which has an emphasis on humour to make it more lifelike.

The most recent version of Grok is version 1.5, which landed in March with improved reasoning capabilities and a context length of 128,000 tokens. Grok 1.5 didn't score as well as GPT-4 on the MMLU, MATH, and GSM8K benchmarks but wasn't far off but managed to surpass GPT-4 on the HumanEval benchmark.

Due to the fact that X doesn't offer a free version of Grok, it is much less popular than alternatives like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. It's unclear whether there will ever be a free version of Grok in the future, but given the costs to run LLMs and Musk's aim to increase X's revenue, it's doubtful we'll see a free version of Grok any time soon.