Elon Musk's artificial intelligence startup, xAI, has been working on a tool for complex research tasks, four current and former employees told Business Insider — and it could compete with features from its rivals OpenAI and Google.
Data annotators at xAI have been working on the tool, known internally as "DeepSearch," since at least late last year, two employees said. The project seeks to train Grok, the company's large language model, to perform multistep research projects in the same way a human might, the two workers said.
Workers on the DeepSearch project use a tool to track their internet searches to teach the AI model their natural search and reasoning skills, according to the employees. While many tasks that these so-called AI tutors perform take three to 10 minutes, workers on the DeepSearch project are expected to take much longer to perform their tasks, two workers familiar with the project said.
It's unclear what stage of development DeepSearch is in or whether xAI will ever roll it out to the public. Grok as publicly available today can do basic factual research, and it provides citation links to its sources.
Spokespeople for xAI did not respond to requests for comment.
The feature appears to be similar to tools developed by other AI companies.
Google launched a "Deep Research" product for its Gemini Advanced subscribers in December. It acts as an AI research assistant and can create multistep research that mimics human research skills. It takes minutes to perform tasks that would take a human much longer, the company says.
OpenAI's feature, similarly dubbed "deep research," launched on February 2 and gathers data from the internet to generate in-depth reports, typically for complex research and investigations. It's designed to follow humanlike reasoning patterns and includes citations; it can also ask follow-up questions. (Several xAI employees mentioned OpenAI's deep research product in conversations with BI.)
A spokesperson for OpenAI, reached by email, referred BI to the company's deep research press release. Google declined to comment.
XAI has been ramping up hiring in recent months and plans to hire thousands of AI tutors, including specialists in STEM and legal affairs, Business Insider previously reported.
Since Grok was released in November 2023, the company has updated the chatbot with several new features, including image generation and link citations. The company also released a stand-alone Grok app in January.
Musk said on Thursday that xAI is close to releasing the latest version of Grok, which "has very powerful reasoning capabilities" and is "outperforming anything that's been released that we're aware of."
Do you work for xAI or have a tip? Reach out to the reporter via a nonwork email and device at gkay@jkmperu.com or via the secure-messaging app Signal at 248-894-6012.
