Elon Musk has confirmed that Grok, the artificial intelligence chatbot from Musk's xAI, is available to all X premium users. Previously, Grok was only available for X premium+ subscribers.
(Photo: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images) C.E.O. of Tesla, Chief Engineer of SpaceX, and C.T.O. of Elon Musk speak during the New York Times annual DealBook summit on November 29, 2023, in New York City.
The tech billionaire confirmed it via an X post. As more advertisers abandon the microblogging platform, the billionaire has emphasized lowering the company's reliance on advertising and shifted his attention to more appealing subscription programs.
X Premium is the company's mid-tier membership, priced at $8 per month (online) or $84 per year. Grok was previously exclusively available to Premium+ users for $16 per month, or a whopping $168 annually, as per sources.
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xAI's Grok Developments
Earlier this March, xAI made a significant move by releasing Grok as an open-source project. Allowing developers and researchers to utilize the powerful 'weights and architecture' behind xAI's Grok chatbot for their projects completely free of charge.
This free release includes the "base model weights and network architecture" of Grok-1, a massive 314 billion-parameter Mixture-of-Experts model. Notably, this model came from a checkpoint last October and has not been fine-tuned for specific applications such as discussion.
Grok is distributed under the Apache 2.0 license, which allows commercial use. However, this version lacks the training data and links to X for real data.
According to a statement issued by xAI in November 2023, the LLM Grok was developed over four months and is designed for applications like code generation, creative writing, and answering questions.
The release is now reportedly accessible on GitHub, allowing anyone to freely experiment with what xAI describes as the "raw" basic version of the pre-trained Grok big language model.
The action comes only days after Musk launched a lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing the business and its CEO, Sam Altman, of abandoning its initial nonprofit objective in favor of a profit-making strategy. Musk co-founded OpenAI with Altman in 2015 and left the technology startup in 2018.
Musk's remark was interpreted as a hit at Altman and his firm, as the ChatGPT creator has no intentions of making the chatbot open source anytime soon, if ever.
Grok's Features
Grok, the "conversational AI for understanding the universe," was first exposed to the public in late 2023. Access to the Grok chatbot required an X membership (sometimes known as a paid blue check). Grok sought to position itself as a more modern and edgy chatbot alternative to OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini.
Grok's chatbot may appeal to Musk's fans and hardcore X users since it will reportedly answer queries about areas other AI chatbots normally avoid, such as conspiracies or more contentious political beliefs. It will also respond to inquiries with a rebellious edge, as Musk has called it. Most significantly, Grok can access real-time X data, which rivals cannot.
However, after early testing, it seemed uninspired and lacked distinguishing qualities that set it apart from more robust and intelligent chatbots elsewhere.
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