Hundreds of Elon Musk chatbot-inspired tokens surface online

Over the weekend, anonymous developers created about 400 GROK tokens named after the eponymous chatbot by Elon Musk.

Combined market capitalisation of these coins has already surpassed tens of millions of dollars. According to on-chain data, one of the first GROK ERC-20 tokens appeared on November 4 and has about 4,300 holders.

As of writing, its 24-hour trading volume exceeds $3.9 million. The asset trades at around $0.001486, having fallen 15% in the last 24 hours.

The largest holders have more than $150,000 of unrealised gains from early ETH purchases.

Another GROK token on the Base network reached a market capitalisation of $4.32 million with a 24-hour turnover of $4.8 million. The asset trades at about $0.000004, up 367% in the last 24 hours.

As anyone can deploy a smart contract on the blockchain, such tokens routinely surface on the back of the hype surrounding a new project. A similar situation happened after Twitter’s rebranding, when the network was flooded with coins with the ticker X.

However, the ease of launching tokens creates opportunities for bad actors — some GROK developers have already run several rug-pull schemes rug pull.

Mr. Musk stated that none of his companies would ever issue their own cryptocurrency token. He made this remark in response to a warning by a user under the alias DogeDesigner that the XAI token has no relation to the billionaire’s AI startup xAI.

What is Grok?

The entrepreneur launched xAI in July with the aim of “understanding the true nature of the universe.” The team includes former staff from DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, Twitter and Tesla.

According to Financial Times, Musk had beforehand purchased thousands of GPUs from Nvidia to develop a large language model.

On November 4, xAI announced the launch of Grok. The neural network is modelled on a guide from Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Announcing Grok!

Grok is an AI modeled after the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, so intended to answer almost anything and, far harder, even suggest what questions to ask!

Grok is designed to answer questions with a bit of wit and has a rebellious streak, so please don’t use…

— xAI (@xai) November 5, 2023

«Grok is designed to answer questions with wit and has a rebellious streak, so please don’t use it if you hate humor», the company warned.

The main feature of the chatbot is that it obtains information and learns in real time via the X social network. The AI also answers “hard questions” that other systems reject.

Grok is written in Rust and remains in early beta. According to xAI’s research, in terms of performance and accuracy the tool outperforms ChatGPT-3.5 and Inflection-1, but lags behind models with deeper training such as ChatGPT-4.

The developers have already opened Grok to a limited number of US users to refine the neural network ahead of a global launch.

As reported in November, Elon Musk’s remark that “NFTs are not on the blockchain” was inserted into the blockchain. This followed his appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, during which he criticized the amount of fraud in the crypto industry and criticised non-fungible tokens.