It's an AI chatbot party and everyone's invited (even Elon, unfortunately)

Amazon, Samsung, and — yes, Xitter — are out to steal ChatGPT's lunch money

How many AI chatbots are too many? I think we're about to find out. Source: Midjourney.

I'm starting to feel a little left out. It feels like everyone but me is introducing a new competitor to ChatGPT, all of them claiming to be biggerer and betterer than the original. In addition to Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Anthropic, there's now Amazon, Samsung, and whatever what used to be Twitter now is. It's like they think there's money in AI or something. [1]

They all have a few things in common, the primary one being oodles of rich juicy data to train their AI brains on, and well as a nearly insatiable appetite for electricity, water, and pencil-necked geeks to keep them running.

I'll start with the one that's likely to make the loudest, most flatulent noise in the market.

Grok

Nearly six months to the day that Elon Musk added his name to a petition calling for a moratorium on AI development, his company announced its new AI chatbot. (Color us surprised.) He's named it Grok (from Stranger in a Strange Land) and modeled its personality after The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, thus besmirching two science fiction legends in one go. [2]

Grok is Space Karen's answer to "woke AI," whatever that is. Per the official announcement from X.ai:

Grok is designed to answer questions with a bit of wit and has a rebellious streak, so please don’t use it if you hate humor! A unique and fundamental advantage of Grok is that it has real-time knowledge of the world via the 𝕏 platform. It will also answer spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems.

As an example of the 'humor' generated by Grok, Elon shared this:

A coke joke. Made by AI. How High-larious. Source: The Guardian.

Probably the most concerning bit is the "real time knowledge of the world" that Grok will take directly from the hot tub full of racist incels formerly known as Twitter. Apparently Musk does not remember the shitshow that resulted when Microsoft released its Tay AI chatbot on Twitter in 2016, which was quickly trained by humor-loving Twitter users to spew Nazi propaganda.

Or maybe he does.

Amazon Olympus

If you're going to name your company after the world's mightiest river, you might as well name your new AI chatbot after the summer home of the Gods.

So far, all we know about Olympus is the name and that it's a whopping 2 trillion parameters in size, or roughly twice the number used by ChatGPT-4. A parameter is a variable that the people who build AI things apply to their training data and adjust to make the models more accurate. Think of an old-school stereo where you can bring up the bass and lower the treble, just to annoy your upstairs neighbors. That's a parameter. Olympus has a metric shit-ton of them.

AI parameters gone wild. Getting mighty crowded up and to the right. Source: Our World in Data.

What Amazon brings to this party is both a huge amount of consumer data and no compunctions whatsoever about monetizing it. Amazon knows what you ordered last summer. Also what you watched on Amazon Prime, what you bought at Whole Foods, any instances of Amazon Web Services you might be running, and those nasty things you said behind Alexa's back when you thought she wasn't listening. So be prepared for that little minx to know even more about you than she does already.

Samsung Gauss

Though people in the US think of Samsung primarily as a maker of phones, TVs, and home appliances, this Korean electronics giant has built at least one of any device you can imagine. [3] So why not an AI chatbot? Per TechCrunch:

Samsung Gauss Language is a large language model that can ... help you write and edit emails, summarize documents and translate languages. Samsung plans to incorporate the large language model into its devices like phones, laptops and tablets to make the company’s smart devices a bit smarter. When asked if it supports both English and Korean as interaction languages, a spokesperson of Samsung declined to comment on it. [4]

Remember Bixby? Of course you don't. Nobody does. (It's Samsung's version of Alexa, introduced in 2018, which no one but extreme Android nerds ever use.) My bold prediction is that Gauss will become the Bixby of AI chatbots. Because there's nothing that captures the imagination of American consumers quite like naming your new chatbot after a 19th century German mathematician. [5]

All the GPTs in the world

Though most of the attention is being paid to ChatGPT, Google Bard, Bing AI, and Anthropic's Claude chatbots, they are hardly the only Chatty Cathy AIs on the block.

There's CodeGPT for software geeks, TruthGPT (an alleged fact-checking app), and VoiceGPT (a "voice-enabled genius personal teammate"). Those of you interested in pursuing crime as a second career can take advantage of FraudGPT, WolfGPT, or WormGPT, which can help you generate more convincing email scams. And there's about to be a few thousand more, now that OpenAI has launched a 'store' where you can create your own custom chatbots.

GPT stands for generative pre-trained transformer, in case that category ever comes up on Jeopardy. These AI models are first pre-trained on an enormous number of documents, web pages, books, etc to develop an understanding of how language operates. Then they are trained again to perform specific tasks, like writing a story or a poem, creating code, making music, drawing images — the generative part of that name. They can also transform a command from language into another medium; that's why if you enter a text prompt into an image generator like DALL-E or Midjourney — like, say, Elon Musk sitting on his throne — they can produce something like this:

If some demented genius were to build CrankyGPT, what would it look and sound like? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

[1] OpenAI is developing a new version of ChatGPT, version 5, due out at the end of 2025. That AI is expected to be even more human-like in its interactions, able to understand audio and video input, draw from a much larger and more current corpus of human knowledge, and will have the ability to swallow a stick of chewing gum and blow bubbles out its butt. (Oh, sorry — that's Grok. My bad.)

[2] The sound you hear is Robert Heinlein and Douglas Adams whirring in their graves.

[3] Including, in 1970, a microwave oven with a tiny built-in TV, so you could watch cooking shows as you irradiated your food. I saw this on a trip to Samsung HQ in 2009, part of the company's utterly fascinating history museum. When I tried to take a photograph of it, a security guard nearly tackled me.

[4] 너 지금 장난하는 거야?

[5] Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777 to 1855), also known as "the Prince of Mathematicians," because he liked to party like it was 1799. (Yes, I am going to keep using this joke, whether you like it or not.)