Elon Musk's xAI starts rolling out AI chatbot Grok to X's premium subscribers

X had introduced Premium+ tier in October 2023 for a monthly fee of $16, providing users with an ad-free experience across the algorithmic 'For You' or the chronological 'Following' feeds on the platform. In India, Premium+ tier is available at Rs 1,300 per month on the web or Rs 2,150 per month on mobile apps.

Grok is the first product from xAI, which Musk says presents a significant challenge to OpenAI's ChatGPT. It was first announced on November 4, 2023 and is powered by an AI model called Grok-1. It's worth noting that Musk was one of the co-founders of OpenAI when it started as a non-profit firm in 2015. He stepped down from the company's board in 2018.

At the time of launch, xAI said the chatbot has access to real-time information from X, thereby ensuring that its knowledge is up-to-date and relevant. In contrast, ChatGPT and Bard aggregates information from various public sources including web content, books and Wikipedia.

Read: Elon Musk's Grok vs OpenAI's ChatGPT: What sets them apart

Another key differentiator is that Grok has a "rebellious streak" modeled after the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and answers questions with a "bit of wit", the company said at the time of launch.

"It will also answer spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems" it said. While announcing the rollout of Grok, Musk also poked fun at both Bard and ChatGPT.

A screenshot of Elon Musk's post on X poking fun at Bard

Earlier this week, xAI had filed with the US securities regulator to raise up to $1 billion in an equity offering. The company has raised $134.7 million in equity financing until now, as per the filings.

In a Twitter Spaces event earlier in the year, Musk said that rather than explicitly programming morality into its AI, xAI will seek to create a "maximally curious" AI.

The rollout of Grok comes a day after Google unveiled Gemini, its newest and the most advanced AI model. Gemini is being rolled out to Bard in two phases: Bard will be powered by a specifically tuned version of Gemini Pro starting December 6, making the chatbot more capable of understanding and summarising, reasoning, coding, and planning.

Gemini Pro will support text-based prompts in Bard at present with multimodal support in the coming months.

Early next year, Google will introduce Bard Advanced, which will give users access to the tech giant's most advanced models and capabilities starting with Gemini Ultra.