X has made its Grok chatbot free to all users. Grok is developed by xAI, Elon Musk’s AI company that was spun up as a response to OpenAI.
The news doesn’t come as a surprise as some users noticed weeks ago that X had begun offering free access to the LLM chatbot.
Musk has proclaimed Grok to be the most free speech-forward chatbot after repeatedly attacking other chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT for being too “woke” by limiting discussion of sensitive topics. Besides discussing topics more freely, Grok also includes a text-to-image generation feature that will generate more explicit images, if you ask it to. Because Musk owns both X and xAI, Grok can access the entire corpus of X content to provide real-time access to somewhat accurate information. Results from Grok can be embedded into X posts.
Grok has been limited to paying X subscribers thus far, but that’s a relatively small number of people, and Musk probably wants more people to give Grok a try as ChatGPT continues to race ahead. Developing large language models is incredibly expensive, and xAI has spent billions scaling up a supercomputer in Memphis, with plans to house at least 1 million GPUs and outpace the likes of OpenAI and Google’s Gemini. X provides by far the most revenue to xAI, but Grok does have a developer API now.
Musk is currently locked in a heated race with OpenAI most directly, which he co-founded only to leave several years later over disputes about the direction of the company. He is currently suing OpenAI over its pivot from a non-profit, open-source company into a commercial enterprise with profit intent as well as its requirement that investors in OpenAI not invest in competitors.
Of course, Musk’s X is a for-profit company and does not allow other companies to use content from the social media network for training. He has a point that he invested $44 million to start OpenAI with the intention of being a non-profit company. But OpenAI has released emails that show Musk urged the company to raise $1 billion and start “being less open” over time, essentially saying if it didn’t become a for-profit entity, it wouldn’t be able to raise enough money from investors to compete with the likes of Google DeepMind. Suing OpenAI to force it to remain a non-profit company could be self-serving and benefit Musk’s own companies, including Tesla, which is developing its own AI-based products that are not open source.
xAI is also important to Musk because he has used shares in the company to repay investors who lost their shirts on his acquisition of Twitter. He has granted shares in the new company, now valued at $50 billion, to those investors, and some of them have invested further capital in the new company.
Although chatbots are still plagued with hallucinations and other problems, OpenAI has said that ChatGPT recently surpassed 300 million weekly active users. Musk will likely need to expand access to Grok beyond X if he wants to catch up.
