Initially reserved for paying subscribers of X Premium (ex-Twitter Blue), Grok can now be requested by all users of
In July 2023, Elon Musk founded xAI. The start-up, which is presented by the billionaire as a “artificial intelligence that tells the truth”launched Grok, its own ChatGPT competitor, in November 2023. The project was initially quite unusual, since this chatbot stood out from its competitors by its sarcastic responses, as well as information taken from Twitter, including when it was false. Elon Musk’s dream is to destroy OpenAI, a company he co-founded before leaving the ship over managerial disagreements (he wanted to run OpenAI), and to once again become number 1 in AI.
During its first year of existence, Grok was a paid product. Elon Musk had decided to reserve his chatbot for X Premium subscribers, the paid plan for accessing his social network X, in particular to convince people to subscribe to it. On December 14, xAI announced a major change: Grok is now a free artificial intelligence.
Grok has made a lot of progress and wants to catch up with ChatGPT
A year after its launch, Grok has evolved a lot. Several LLMs have been published by the company, which now claims to follow the instructions better than its competitors.
Grok 2, the latest version of the model, is capable of doing more things, while using Internet users’ tweets to inform about what is happening in the world in real time. Grok still says stupid things from time to time, but can be used for more specific purposes (sorting notes, translating, planning a trip, etc.). One of its new capabilities is being able to search the web and respond with quotes, to adjust the accuracy of the answers.
In addition to text, Grok stands out from others for its ability to generate images, including imitating faces of public figures or copyrighted characters. A use which makes Grok more “funny” than the others, since he is the only one to agree to commit illegal tasks by not respecting image rights.
Since it went free, many people are using AI for this reason, which helps explain why Elon Musk is playing games with the law. Grok’s generation of fake photos is a way of luring users to the service, only bringing them in to mock a public figure.
Free, the new bet for AI startups
Why make Grok free, at the risk of making X Premium lose interest?
Elon Musk, like other AI giants, notes that paid subscriptions are too great a barrier to the adoption of this new technology. Like ChatGPT or Perplexity, it comes to the conclusion that a free service is the only way to get usage off the ground, even if it means losing money initially. Grok will also be able to explain the context of a tweet soon, with a new dedicated button, which could introduce it to people who do not use generative AI.
In its blog post, xAI says that Grok is now free for all X users, but only X Premium subscribers can ask it unlimited questions and access the latest news first (the limit is 10 interactions every two hours for the free service, with 4 image creations per day). An approach comparable to that of OpenAI with ChatGPT Plus.
