Shortly after screenshots surfaced showing xAI’s chatbot Grok appearing on X’s web app, X owner Elon Musk confirmed that Grok will be available to all of the company’s Premium+ subscribers sometime “in the next week.” While Musk’s statements regarding timeframes for product deliveries didn’t always hold up, code developments in X’s own implementation revealed that Grok integration was already underway.
This week, application researcher Nima Owji shared screenshots showing how Grok had been added to X’s web app, noting that its URL would be twitter.com/i/grok. In a screenshot, users who were not already Premium+ subscribers will be prompted to upgrade to gain access to Grok. Another showed an “Ask Grok” text input box for communicating with the AI chatbot. However, the specs weren’t public at the time of its discovery, but they hinted that the Grok’s launch was nearing.
First released on Nov. 4 to select testers, Grok is Musk’s answer to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, Anthropic’s Claude and others, and could potentially gain fans as part of the broader social platform of X
Additionally, xAI, the Musk-owned company behind Grok, promises its chatbot will have more personality than its competitors. It aims to answer users’ questions “with a bit of brains” and is said to have a “revolutionary range”. according to its website. The chatbot also plans to answer “spicy” questions rejected by other AI systems, the company noted.
But personality alone won’t be the key to differentiating Grok – it’ll also have access to real-time knowledge through the X platform, which could be an interesting element, if not the one that leads to the highest accuracy in terms of concerns his answers.
The addition could help signups for X’s Premium subscription, which hasn’t yet taken off as well as Musk had hoped. The X owner upgraded Twitter Blue to become X Premium, promising paid verification among many other features, including increased exposure to replies, an edit button, the ability to post longer posts and videos, and a reduction in ads.
As a result, X recently announced that it will separate its Premium service to include three tiers: a basic $3 per month subscription that removes ads, the existing $8 per month X Premium subscription, and a $16 per month Premium+ subscription that removes all ads in “For you and the following” feeds and introduces a Creator Center where users can get paid to post and offer their fans subscriptions.
Grok joins this higher price tier, which could encourage other X users beyond creators to sign up. That additional revenue is needed now more than ever as X faces an advertiser exodus over concerns about anti-Semitic content on the platform and Musk’s own behavior in fueling anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.
Notably, Grok’s anticipated debut follows a week of drama at rival AI firm OpenAI, where within days CEO Sam Altman was ousted in a board revolt, then joined by co-founder Greg Brockman, who they were both. announced as Microsoft’s new hires, before negotiations Altman returns as CEO with a new board.
While Grok’s arrival won’t have the boardroom drama of OpenAI, Altman has taken note of Grok’s arrival, even delving into the chatbot’s purported comedic abilities, posting a screenshot of a GPT instructing it to “be a chatbot that answers questions with terrible humor” and calling it Grok. Musk he responded calling ChatGPT-4 “GPT-Snore,” adding that “humor is clearly prohibited on OpenAI, as are many other topics it censors.”
Early co-founder of OpenAI, Musk he later left the nonprofit and withdrew his planned donation after Altman and OpenAI’s other founders rejected an offer that would have allowed Musk to take control of the company. The move led to a public rift between two key figures in the AI industry, with Musk later launching his own AI company, xAI, with veterans from Google DeepMind, Google Research, OpenAI, Microsoft Research and Tesla .
Grok has since been trained on a knowledge base similar to ChatGPT and Meta’s Llama 2, but will leverage real-time access to X information, Musk said. He will also be able to search the internet for up-to-date information on certain topics.
