Social network X is rolling out access to xAI's Grok chatbot to premium tier subscribers after Elon Musk announced the expansion to more paid users last month. The company said in its announcement: Support page In some regions, only Premium and Premium+ users can interact with chatbots.
After Musk's xAI announced Grok last year, the chatbot became available to Premium+ users, those who pay a subscription fee of $16 a month or $168 a year. The latest update gives users who pay $8 per month access to the chatbot.
Users can chat with Grok in “normal mode” or “fun mode.” Like other large-scale language model (LLM) products, Grok displays a label indicating that the chatbot returns an incorrect answer.
We've already seen some examples of that. Earlier this week, X rolled out a new exploration view within her Grok where the chatbot summarizes trending news articles. Notably, Jeff Bezos and his NVIDIA-backed Perplexity AI also summarize news articles.
But Grok appears to be going a step further than just writing a headline and summarizing the story. As Mashable writes, the chatbot wrote a fake headline that read, “Iran attacks Tel Aviv with large missile.”
Musk likely wants more people to use Grok chatbots to compete with other products such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, and Anthropic's Claude. Over the past few months, he has publicly criticized OpenAI's operations. Musk also sued the company in March, accusing it of “betrayal” of his nonprofit's goals. In response, OpenAI filed papers seeking to dismiss all of Musk's claims and released email exchanges between the Tesla CEO and the company.
Last month, xAI open sourced Grok, but without details of its training data. As my colleague Devin Coldewey claimed, it remains unclear whether this is the latest version of the model and whether the company intends to be more transparent about its approach to model development and information about its training data. Questions remain.