Elon Musk Ups His AI Game

Elon Musk pulled off a late entry into the artificial intelligence (AI) field by turning X, the social media platform he bought, into xAI. Many thought that he had overpaid for the acquisition of what was once Twitter, but its vast data became a gold mine to train Grok, the generative AI bot. Recently, Grok 4, the most advanced version, was launched and soon after came Grok Imagine, which can even generate videos from prompts or images. Others, like Google’s Veo 3 and OpenAI’s Sora, have the same ability, but they come at a price for access. Musk has made Grok Imagine free for all users and it is also very quick at exe­cuting prompts. This is targeting users of competing AI platforms to switch over. Another incentive for many users is a ‘spicy’ mode, which allows adult content though it immediately ran into trouble when a tech publication was able to generate revealing images of singer Taylor Swift. Unlike other AI companies, Musk believes in less stringent censoring. He wrote on X on August 17: “The goal of Grok Imagine is to give you superhuman imagination powers.”

Smart Vision

Envision, a startup founded by two Indians has partnered with eyewear brand Solos to launch a new generation of smart glasses specifically tailored for blind and low-vision users. Dubbed Ally Solos Glasses, they can read text, describe the environment, perform web searches, and recognise people, signs and objects, all through audio cues delivered via built-in speakers. The glasses will have an AI assistant, Ally.

Peace of Mind

Anthropic is allowing its models Claude Opus 4 and 4.1 to exit a conversation if a user is being abusive or making harmful requests. It claims to be doing this to improve the ‘welfare’ of AI systems. Voicing support, Elon Musk has said he will be giving Grok a quit button. This comes as a debate over AI sentience grows, with some arguing that AI systems will develop moral status sooner than later.

User’S Choice

Google’s Preferred Sources feature that has just been launched gives users more control over what shows up in their Top Stories feed. Instead of relying on its preset algorithms, users can now customise search results by adding their favourite websites and blogs as Preferred Sources. Once added, stories from these outlets will appear more prominently within their feed. This feature is being rolled out first in India and the US.

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