In November 2023, Elon Musk's xAI company announced a new AI model called "Grok", which attracted a lot of attention. In this article, we will introduce an overview of xAI Grok and explain how to use its API.
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What is Grok?
Grok is a new AI model announced by Musk's xAI company. Compared to other AI models, Grok provides more humorous responses and sometimes takes a defiant attitude, which may reflect Musk's personality to some extent.
Goals of Grok
According to the content published on Grok's official website, the goals of Grok's release and what it aims to achieve can be summarized as follows:
Create an AI tool to support the pursuit of human knowledge and understanding
- Gather feedback and build an AI tool that benefits people from diverse backgrounds and political views
- Serve as a powerful research assistant to empower research and innovation
Bring significant benefits through AI
- Publicly release Grok and prove this approach
- Act as a support tool for generating new ideas, processing data, and quickly accessing relevant information
Summarizing these goals, Grok is an innovative project aimed at broadly supporting human intellectual activities and maximizing the benefits of AI, which xAI company is trying to implement.
Grok's Performance
How does Grok perform? How does it compare to other popular AI models already on the market? Grok's official documentation compares Grok's performance to ChatGPT, LLaMa, and Claude 2:
- With equivalent computational resources, Grok outperformed other models (LLaMA, ChatGPT-3.5, Inflection-1) on standard machine learning benchmarks (GSM8k, MMLU, HumanEval, MATH).
- However, it still does not match the performance of much larger models like GPT-4.
- On a set of 2023 Hungarian high school mathematics entrance exam questions, Grok-1 scored 59% (Grade C), Claude-2 scored 55%, and GPT-4 scored 68% (Grade B).
In other words, Grok achieves top-level performance with equivalent computational resources but does not completely outperform large models like GPT-4. While still in the early stages of development, Grok has shown promising results.
How to Use Grok
Currently, to use Grok, you need to subscribe to X's paid service, the X Premium Plus plan (monthly fee of $16). After purchasing X Premium Plus, you can easily use Grok by following these steps:
Step 1: Access the X (formerly Twitter) page, log in to your account, and click "Grok" in the left menu.
Step 2: This will display the chat screen, where you can start chatting with Grok.
A notable feature of Grok is its ability to search for the latest information and news on the X platform and incorporate it into its responses.
Is it Possible to Use the Grok API?
Many developers may need to integrate the Grok service into their projects or develop new applications based on Grok, rather than using its general service. In such cases, they would need to use the Grok API. But how can you use the Grok API?
In conclusion, Grok currently does not provide a REST API and only offers gRPC. It is recommended to use the official Grok Python SDK.
Obtaining Grok API Key
Before using the Grok SDK, you need to obtain a Grok API key. Follow these steps to get your Grok API key:
Step 1: Access the Grok PromptIDE (ide.x.ai), log in with your X account, click the profile icon in the top right corner, and select "API Keys".
Step 2: Click the "Create API Key" button, and in the new window, customize the ACL (permissions) for the API key.
Step 3: After setting the Grok API key ACL (permissions), click the "Save" button to save the API key.
Step 4: Your Grok API key is now created. This page will display the API key, and you can copy, delete, or edit it from here.
Step 5: Once you have obtained the Grok API key, you can use the official Grok Python SDK to access the Grok API.
Using Grok Python SDK
Using the Grok Python SDK is a straightforward way to access the xAI API. Install the Grok Python SDK on your computer using the following PIP command, and then refer to the detailed usage guide.
pip install xai-sdk
Step 1: Before using the SDK, save your API key in the XAI_API_KEY environment variable.
export XAI_API_KEY=[Your API key goes here]
Step 2: Use the following command to verify that you have access permission to the API.
python -c "import xai_sdk; xai_sdk.does_it_work()"
Step 3: After installing the SDK and successfully setting up your API key, you can run a sample application like this:
"""A simple example demonstrating text completion."""
import asyncio
import xai_sdk
async def main():
"""Runs the example."""
client = xai_sdk.Client()
prompt = "The answer to live and the universe is"
print(prompt, end="")
async for token in client.sampler.sample(prompt, max_len=3):
print(token.token_str, end="")
print("")
asyncio.run(main())
Note: You can only run the application if your API key has the sampler:write ACL assigned.
Apidog | Easily Connect to Various AI Models via API
Unlike the Grok API, other AI models like OpenAI and Claude provide REST APIs and WebSocket services. In such cases, you can use a comprehensive API management tool called Apidog to easily access these APIs and integrate AI services into your projects via these APIs.
Apidog not only supports API design, documentation, mock servers, and test automation but also provides a service called the API Hub, which hosts over 1,000 third-party API projects. In this API Hub, you can easily access and use various API projects.
Steven Ang Cheong Seng
David Demir
By accessing these AI model API projects in Apidog, you can click the "Try it out" button to easily use and test these APIs.
Summary
In this article, we provided a detailed explanation of "Grok", a new AI model announced by Elon Musk's xAI company. While Grok achieves top-level performance with equivalent computational resources, it does not yet match the performance of large models like GPT-4. We also covered the steps to obtain a Grok API key, as it is necessary to use the Grok API. Since Grok does not provide a REST API, you need to use gRPC and the official Grok Python SDK.
Finally, we introduced the Apidog service and how to access other AI model APIs like OpenAI and Claude through it.
