CNBC's Michal Lev-Ram joins 'The Exchange' to discuss AI companions assisting chatbots and its impact on the technology.

The release of Open AI's ChatGPT has accelerated the development of artificial intelligence and warnings about its impact on society.

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Elon Musk's AI company, XAI, has announced plans to launch a child-focused artificial intelligence app named Baby Grok. This follows the recent introduction of AI companion features, which are currently available to paying subscribers of XAI's Grok chatbot. 

While specifics about Baby Grok's safety controls and content filtering have not yet been disclosed, the announcement comes amid growing industry attention to the need for kid-friendly AI platforms. Other companies, such as Google, are also developing similar offerings for younger users. Experts note that while perfect safety cannot be guaranteed, providing dedicated children's versions of AI apps is a positive step.

Elon Musk plans to build a kid-friendly AI app

Elon Musk posting over the weekend that XAI, his company, will make an app designed for kids called Baby Grok. It comes after launching two so-called AI companions, or kind of animated AI characters that users can interact with. Joining us to discuss this trend is CNBC contributor Michal LeBron out in San Francisco for today's Tech Check. Michal, it's great to have you. Welcome aboard. Nice to be here. I don't know whether to start with sort of an AI chatbot that's safe for kids or these companions, which sound a little creepy, but I acknowledge are kind of the future of where this is going. Well, I'll start with the not safe for work stuff, if that's OK. These companion apps, you know, this has existed as a category that's actually existed for a while, but been kind of fringe, I would say. And then on the other hand, you've got these more mainstream chatbots like ChatGPT and XAI's Grok. I think what's unique now and what Elon Musk is doing is sort of converging these two worlds. So now for the first time, really, you're seeing a companion mode sitting on top of a more mainstream multipurpose chatbot, Grok. And these are they're making a lot of waves, let's say that. It is really interesting that right after this not safe for work stuff and I've interacted with them. We can get to that if you have questions on that as well. But right after that, they have made the announcement of this safe for kids version, which there's a lot of details we don't know about yet. So in some ways that followed from people understandably going, wait a minute on this work. I'm trying to log into my Grok now. But does this just pop up as an option, this companion mode? Well, you have to pay for it. So if you are a paying subscriber, you become a paying subscriber to Grok. So it's a premium offering like a lot of, you know, ChatGPT has its version. Basically, all of the chatbots have their flavor of this. With Grok, with XAI, it's $30 a month. So if you pay for it, you can access companion mode. And what's unique here, again, is that it's the interface layer. And even though this has made a lot of waves for the kind of explicit not safe for work sort of banter that these avatars participate in, if indeed they're able to create more stickiness here, if there is an emotional attachment layer, which we've seen with other AI companions, it's actually not as fringe as some people might think. Then I think there's something here. But yes, you can access it if you pay and you opt into it. So you don't have to interact with Grok in this way, but you can. It's like a Tamagotchi, but just, you know, I guess you don't have to feed it and it's much older. And so quickly, Michal, on that. So Baby Grok, then, is that a separate app that has kid safe controls? And what are those kid safe controls? Is it just kind of really not safe for kid type of content or is it more than that? So this is all TBD. All we know is what Elon Musk has announced on X, which is really just that this is coming. You know, I would imagine that it's going to be offered as a standalone app. I think that would make sense. That's the direction that Google with Gemini is going because they're also rolling out Gemini for kids. And I think we'll be seeing more and more of this, you know, myself as a parent and as someone who is now interacted with some of the avatars on Grok, I wouldn't want my kids accessing information this way. And I think, you know, beyond these avatars, even just for your average chat GPT, you're, you know, interacting with Grok the way most people do. It makes sense to have some kind of safeguard, some kind of parameters. There are a lot of issues there as well because you can't have perfect safety, but makes a lot of sense to me. No, I agree. And in fact, you know, it's kind of an overdue thing, I think, for there to be kids versions of a lot of these apps. They always find a way. I know I get that, but at least it's a try. Michal, thanks so much. Really appreciate it for now. We'll leave it there. Thank you.

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Elon Musk plans to build a kid-friendly AI app

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