ChatGPT creator mocks Elon Musk’s new AI for ‘dad jokes’ and ‘cringey boomer humour’

Sam Altman, the head of ChatGPT creators OpenAI, has mocked Elon Musk’s entry into the artificial intelligence market.

This week, Mr Musk’s xAI company unveiled Grok, another chat-based AI system along the lines of ChatGPT.

He claimed that the app was written to be irreverent and funny, and to avoid what he suggested was censorship on other platforms such as ChatGPT.

But the creator of that rival hit back at Grok in a tweet that suggested grok “tell[s] jokes like your dad’s dad” and that it traded in “cringey boomer humour”. The system works in a “sort of awkward shock-to-get-laughs sort of way”, he said.

Mr Altman’s post showed him programming a system of his own, using a new OpenAI feature, and showed a screen grab of the instructions he had given to the system. He joked that “GPTs can save a lot of effort” in reference to a new feature, named GPTs, which allows people to creat their own versions of his chatbot that include specific and custom characteristics.

Mr Musk responded with what appeared to be a quote from his own Grok AI. That response joked that “humour is clearly banned at OpenAI”.

The marketing of Mr Musk’s Grok has revolved primarily around the fact that it will answer questions that other systems will refuse, and its tone is more irreverent than rival systems such as ChatGPT and Google’s Bard. When it was launched, for instance, he shared an example of how it will answer “almost anything”, sharing a screenshot of it being asked how to make cocaine.

“Grok is designed to answer questions with a bit of wit and has a rebellious streak,” a blog post announcing its launch noted. “Please don’t use it if you hate humour!”

Grok is also different from those systems in that it has real-time access to posts and data from Twitter. Other AI firms were using that site to train their models, but Mr Musk has looked to cut them off, arguing that it is causing too much demand on the site.