Social platform X is introducing access to xAI’s Grok chatbot for its Premium tier subscribers, following Elon Musk’s recent announcement regarding the expansion to a broader user base. The platform’s support page specifies that only Premium and Premium+ subscribers in certain regions can engage with the chatbot.
Previously, Grok was exclusively available to Premium+ users, who pay either $16 per month or a $168 annual subscription fee. With this update, users with an $8 monthly subscription can also utilize the chatbot.
Users can interact with Grok in either “Regular mode” or “Fun mode.” Similar to other Large Language Model (LLM) tools, Grok includes labels indicating potential inaccuracies in its responses.
Recently, X introduced a new explore view within Grok, where the chatbot provides summaries of trending news stories. Notably, other entities like Jeff Bezos and NVIDIA-backed Perplexity AI also offer news summaries, but Grok goes a step further by generating headlines. One example highlighted by Mashable was a fabricated headline about “Iran Strikes Tel Aviv with Heavy Missiles.”
Elon Musk’s objective likely includes expanding Grok’s user base to compete with products such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, or Anthropic’s Claude. Musk has been vocal about his criticisms of OpenAI’s operations, even filing a lawsuit in March over perceived deviations from its non-profit mission. In response, OpenAI has defended its position and released email exchanges with Musk.
While xAI has open-sourced Grok, details about its training data remain undisclosed. Questions persist about the model’s latest version and xAI’s transparency regarding its development approach and training data information.
