Musk Hints at Kid-Friendly Version of AI Chatbot Grok

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot is about to spawn a new generation.

“We’re going to make Baby Grok, an app dedicated to kid-friendly content,” the billionaire wrote in a post on his X social media platform Saturday (July 19) night without offering further details.

Grok is the name of the AI model used by Musk’s xAI startup, introduced in November 2023 and touted for its sarcastic sense of humor as well as its reasoning capabilities.

Musk’s comments about a kid-friendly version of the tool came a little more than a week after xAI debuted its newest version of Grok — Grok 4 — which the CEO called “the smartest AI in the world,” adding that in “some ways, it’s terrifying.”

As PYMNTS reported, Musk likened Grok 4 to a “super-genius child” in which the “right values” of truthfulness and a sense of honor must be instilled so society can benefit from its advances.

Musk said Grok 4 was built to perform at the “post-graduate level” in many topics simultaneously, which no person can do. It can generate realistic visuals and tackle complex analytical tasks.

In addition, Musk said Grok 4 would score perfectly on SAT and graduate-level exams like GRE even without seeing the questions ahead of time.

Grok also encountered controversy this month when the chatbot praised Adolf Hitler in a conversation on X. xAI has since said it has taken action to ban hate speech.

In other AI news, PYMNTS wrote recently about the recent wave of funding for AI startups. For example, the AI search company Perplexity saw its valuation reach $18 billion following its latest funding round of $100 million.

“Capital raised by Perplexity, which has tripled its valuation over the past year, point to robust investor interest in the competitive AI search market especially for leading startups,” that report said. “Apple reportedly was interested in acquiring Perplexity.”

An even bigger funding round last week involved Thinking Machines, founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati. That company achieved a $10 billion valuation after raising $2 billion.

“We’re building multimodal AI that works with how you naturally interact with the world — through conversation, through sight, through the messy way we collaborate,” Murati said in a post on X.

Finally, reports emerged last week that Anthropic had been approached by investors with funding offers that could value the startup at $100 billion. The company’s valuation hit $61.5 billion earlier this year after a $3.5 billion fundraise.