Elon Musk's artificial intelligence (AI) startup xAI has rolled out its AI chatbot, Grok, to all users on the social platform X (formerly Twitter), escalating competition with OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, Meta's Meta AI, and Microsoft's Copilot.
Prior to this rollout, Grok was available only to subscribers of X's higher-tier plans, X Premium and X Premium+.
This extension comes a day after xAI disclosed a $6 billion fundraise from about 97 investors, without revealing the names of the investors. This round brings xAI's total funding to $12 billion since its launch in July 2023. Among its earlier backers include Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, and Saudi Arabian prince Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal and Kingdom Holding.
Free users can send up to 10 messages every two hours, after which they will be prompted to upgrade to a paid subscription. They can also analyse three images per day. Moneycontrol also observed that xAI has removed access to the Grok-2 mini AI model on the chatbot, providing access only to Grok-2.
xAI launched Grok-2 in August with image generation capabilities, that is powered by AI startup Black Forest Labs' FLUX.1 model. The chatbot will feature advanced capabilities in both text and vision understanding, which will integrate real-time information from the X platform, the company said at the time. xAI added image understanding feature to Grok in October.
xAI has positioned Grok as an AI assistant with a "twist of humor and a dash of rebellion", inspired by the science fiction comedy series The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and JARVIS from the popular movie Iron Man.
The company states that Grok is designed to answer questions "with a touch of wit and humor", while also providing helpful and insightful responses. "It will also answer spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems" xAI said.
Read: Musk's xAI plans massive expansion of AI supercomputer in Memphis
Earlier this month, the firm also started offering developers access to its AI models through an API. It is now gearing up to launch a standalone consumer app for Grok, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal.
This announcement follows rivals Meta and OpenAI touting new usage numbers for their respective chatbots.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated on December 6 that Meta AI now has nearly 600 million monthly active users, while releasing a new version of its Llama AI model.
Meanwhile, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman mentioned on December 5 that ChatGPT has over 300 million active users on a weekly basis. He also announced a new $200 monthly subscription tier called ChatGPT Pro that offers unlimited access to OpenAI o1, GPT-4o, and Advanced Voice mode.
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