Elon Musk's xAI launches Grok 2 chatbot with image generation feature

Billionaire Elon Musk

Elon Musk's artificial intelligence startup xAI on August 14 introduced a new version of its AI chatbot Grok which among other features will generate images, as competition intensifies with OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, Facebook parent Meta's Meta AI and Microsoft's Copilot.

Grok is available to all subscribers of X Premium and X Premium+, the subscription tiers of X, the Musk-owned social network formerly known as Twitter.

In a blogpost, xAI said subscribers will have access to two new models: Grok-2 and Grok-2 mini, both of which are currently available in beta on X.

Grok-2 will be the flagship AI assistant accessible through the Grok tab in the X app. The chatbot will feature advanced capabilities in both text and vision understanding, which will integrate real-time information from the X platform.

Grok-2 mini is a small model that "offers a balance between speed and answer quality", the company said.

Grok-2 will have the ability to generate images on the X platform and also feature a redesigned interface.

xAI said it is experimenting with Flux.1, a text-to-image AI model from Black Forest Labs, to expand Grok's capabilities on X. Black Forest Labs is an AI startup founded by former developers of AI firm Stability.ai.

"Compared to its predecessor, Grok-2 is more intuitive, steerable, and versatile across a wide range of tasks, whether you're seeking answers, collaborating on writing, or solving coding tasks" xAI said in a blogpost.

X Premium and Premium+ subscribers will have access to two new models: Grok-2 and Grok-2 mini.

xAI said it introduced an early version of Grok-2 under the name "sus-column-r" into the LMSYS chatbot arena, a popular competitive language model benchmark. The AI model is outperforming both Claude and GPT-4 on the LMSYS leaderboard in terms of its overall Elo score.

Elo score, adapted from chess, measures the relative capabilities of large language models.

The firm said these models will also help with a range of AI-driven features on X such as enhanced search capabilities, gaining deeper insights on posts and improved reply functions.

xAI plans to release both models to developers through its enterprise API platform later this month. "Soon, we will release a preview of multimodal understanding as a core part of the Grok experience on X and API," the firm said.

xAI was founded by Musk in July 2023. It raised $6 billion in Series B funding from investors such as Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, and Saudi Arabian prince Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal and Kingdom Holding in May 2024. Other investors include Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, and Fidelity.

The company released its first AI model, Grok-1, in November and followed it up with the Grok-1.5 model that improved reasoning capabilities and a context length of 128,000 tokens in March.

A month later, xAI introduced its first multimodal model Grok-1.5V that can process a wide variety of visual information, including documents, diagrams, charts, screenshots, and photographs.