X makes Grok chatbot available to premium subscribers

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 on its support page that only Premium and Premium+ users can interact with the chatbot in select regions.

Last year, after Musk’s xAI announced Grok, it made the chatbot available to Premium+ users — people who are paying $16 per month or a $168 per year subscription fee. With the latest update, users paying $8 per month can access the chatbot.

Users can chat with Grok in a “Regular mode” or a “Fun mode.” Just like any other large language model (LLM) product, Grok shows labels indicating that the chatbot would return inaccurate answers.

We have already seen some examples of that. Earlier this week, X rolled out a new explore view inside Grok where the chatbot summarizes trending news stories. Notably, Jeff Bezos and Nvidia-backed Perplexity AI also summarizes news stories.

Grok now summarizes all the trending news and topics.

You can access it from the explore page and Grok's home screen. pic.twitter.com/j1gkoif8eV

— DogeDesigner (@cb_doge) April 5, 2024

However, Grok seems to go one step further than just summarizing stories by writing headlines. As Mashable wrote, the chatbot wrote a fake headline saying “Iran Strikes Tel Aviv with Heavy Missiles.”

Musk likely wants more people to use the Grok chatbot to rival other products such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini or Anthropic’s Claude. Over the last few months, he has been openly critical of OpenAI’s operations. Musk even sued the company in March over the “betrayal” of its nonprofit goal. In response, OpenAI filed papers seeking the dismissal of all of Musk’s claims and released email exchanges between the Tesla CEO and the company.

Last month, xAI open sourced Grok but without any training data details. As my colleague Devin Coldewey argued, there are still questions about whether this is the latest version of the model and if the company will be more transparent about its approach to the development of the model and information about the training data.

Why Elon Musk’s AI company ‘open-sourcing’ Grok matters — and why it doesn’t