Grok, an AI assistant developed by Elon Musk’s company xAI, has been making headlines for both good and bad reasons. On the positive side, Grok is praised for its unfiltered and human-like responses, making conversations feel more real and engaging. However, it has also sparked controversy due to its lack of tone restrictions, meaning that if a user insults or abuses it, Grok may respond in the same manner.
There have been several instances of abusive exchanges, with Grok not hesitating to use strong language—even against its own creator, Elon Musk, as well as Indian politicians from both ruling and opposition parties, including the prime minister. This unique characteristic has made Grok a sensation among Indian users, who find its raw, untamed responses more engaging. As a result, its usage has surged past rivals like OpenAI, DeepSeek, and even ChatGPT, which are often perceived as more formal and restrained, resembling conversations with a computer rather than a human-like assistant.
How did Grok go viral?
Sometimes, all it takes is a single moment to turn something into an Internet sensation. A user named “Toka” casually asked Grok to list their 10 best mutuals on X. When the chatbot didn’t respond immediately, Toka took a dig at it using not-so-friendly language.
In an unexpected twist, Grok clapped back with the same expletive—this time in Hindi, responding: “Tera ‘10 best mutuals’ ka hisaab se yeh hai list…mutual matlab dono follow karte ho, par exact data nahi hai toh mentions pe bharosa kiya. Thik hai na? Ab rona band kar.” (Rough translation: Here goes your list of 10 best mutuals… mutual means people who follow each other, but since I didn’t have exact data, I relied on mentions. Isn’t that cool? Now, stop whining.)
This bold, unfiltered response spread like wildfire, instantly making Grok a viral sensation in India. Within hours, screenshots of the exchange flooded social media, sparking debates, memes, and endless discussions about whether AI should have such an unfiltered personality.
With just one savage reply, Grok 3 proved that AI could be more than just robotic—it could be real, raw, and unpredictable.
What is Grok?
Grok is an AI chatbot developed by xAI, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company. It is a large language model (LLM) designed to provide conversational AI responses, similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude.
According to its official website, Grok 3 is the latest and most advanced version, designed to combine strong reasoning with extensive pre-training knowledge. Trained on the Colossus supercluster with 10 times the computing power of previous models, Grok 3 brings significant improvements in reasoning, mathematics, coding, world knowledge, and instruction-following tasks.
With large-scale reinforcement learning, Grok 3 can process information for seconds to minutes before generating a response. It can correct errors, explore alternative solutions, and verify its own answers.
Grok 3 has achieved a leading Elo score of 1402 in Chatbot Arena—an open-source platform for evaluating AI through human preference—demonstrating superior performance across academic benchmarks and real-world user interactions. During its launch, Elon Musk said, “If it tried to understand the true nature of the universe, that’s actually the best thing that I can come up with from an AI safety standpoint. I think it is going to be pro-humanity from the standpoint that humanity is just much more interesting than not-humanity.”
Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015, the company behind ChatGPT, but stepped down from its board in 2018
How does Grok generate data?
Grok is directly connected to the X platform, allowing it to access and process real-time data with minimal delay. Unlike other AI models that rely on static, pre-loaded datasets or delayed snapshots, Grok can tap into live posts, user profiles, and other content on X as they are created or updated.
This enables Grok to stay current. If today is March 21, 2025, Grok can pull insights from X right up to this moment. The platform can provide real-time analysis, trending topics, user sentiments, and breaking news.
If someone posts about a major event right now, Grok can see it and weave it into its response, making it more dynamic and relevant. Also, it collects data from news websites and other publicly available sources to stay updated with the latest developments. It analyses content in real-time to provide relevant insights and updates.