Elon Musk has cast his hat into the already crowded AI ring with Grok , a conversational AI designed to challenge both the likes ofChatGPTandMidjourney , by volunteer a chatbot with more of “ a sentience of humor ” than other artificial intelligence ( read : fewer content restrictions and more swearing ) , as Musk has quip .

It ’s all accessed by and trained on ten social medium platform , as you might guess . Here ’s everything you need to be intimate about it .

What is Grok?

Grok is a generative AI chatbot that has been produce by xAI , Musk ’s artificial intelligence startup . It was originally built atop what has been call the Grok-1 mannequin . Grok-1 was developed over the trend of months on a cluster of “ tens of thousands ” of GPUs andleverages the Flux.1 modelby Black Forest Labs for its look-alike - propagation potentiality .

The example is trained on a mix of web data ( with a knowledge cutoff of Q3 2023 ) andX user datum . Currently , Grok the chatbot is powered by the Grok-2 model , which was released in August 2024 .

The chatbot first rolled out in November 2023 ( and , surely coincidentally , less than a year afterMusk signed an opened letterdemanding the industry take a six - calendar month moratorium toward further AI exploitation ) . It was market as an extremist - premium feature and was made available entirely to tribe paying $ 16 / calendar month for the X Premium+ subscription . That exclusivity waned in March 2024 when X expanded its availability to its $ 8 / calendar month X Premium endorser . Grok is not presently available to free - tier ecstasy users .

In January 2025 , Grok made the leap from being a feature within the X claver platform to being an app of its ownwith the release of Grok for iOS . useable on both iOS and iPadOS devices , the app offers devoid access to Grok-2 , which was released inAugust 2024 . user can leverage the AI ’s text and image generation capabilities through the app , though the existing limitations for free tier users ( 10 queries every two hours ) remain in place .

The late iteration of the chatbot , Grok-3 , debuted in February 2025 . agree to the xAI squad , which made the announcement via livestream , Grok-3 is “ a order of magnitude more capable ” than its predecessor and10 - 15 fourth dimension more powerful . The team also claimed that Grok-3 is more brawny than Google ’s Gemini and DeepSeek . Similar to OpenAI ’s o1 and o3 example , Grok-3 reportedly volunteer reasoning capableness for more complex labor .

If you ’re question where the bizarre name came from , “ Grok ” was coin in the Robert Heinlein novelStranger in a Strange Land . The original signification was to “ empathize intuitively or by empathy , to launch resonance with . ”

Where did Grok come from?

Elon Musk co - establish OpenAI along with Sam Altman and other investor in 2015 . However , just three years later , Musk quit the startup , claiming he“didn’t check with some of what OpenAI squad want to do . ” Altman and company become on to launch ChatGPT in November 2022 , kick off the AI Revolution , and give Muska disgustful case of FOMO . In April 2023 , just a calendar month after OpenAI released GPT-4 . Musk went on the Tucker Carlson Showto annunciate he would be building“a maximum truth - seek AI that taste to understand the nature of the universe of discourse ” that would n’t stoop to societal shade like ChatGPT , which , he argued , was being “ cultivate to be politically correct . ” He called the AI “ TruthGPT ” because , as has proventimeandagain , stigmatization is not Musk ’s strong suit . TruthGPT was rename Grok at its tone ending .

Grok-1 was replace by Grok-1.5 in March 2024 , which offered improved performance and a linguistic context length of 128,000 relic . That April , X incorporated Grok AI into its Explore segment to summarize breaking news stories , a role previously performed by humans . On its first day in use , the AI immediatelyhallucinated a headlineabout Iran bombarding Israel with “ grueling missiles ” that was then promoted by the party ’s trending news tab . Grok-1.5 has since been replaced by Grok-2 , and Grok-2 mini , in August 2024 .

What can Grok do?

Grok has been “ modeled afterThe Hitchhiker ’s Guide to the Galaxy , ” the companyexplained in its launching announcement , “ so [ it ’s ] intended to answer almost anything . ” The open - origin large language manikin reportedly boasts 314 billion parameter ( about three - quarters the size ofLlama 3.1 - 405B ) and has been trained on both data from the public web as well as the data from go users themselves .

X had quietlychanged its drug user circumstance in Julyto mechanically leave xAI to skin it for breeding data , but quickly overturn course after outcry from users and privateness counsellor . That stuntnetted Musk a lawsuit from nine European Union nationsfor plunder the GDPR .

Grok can answer user queries on issue up to its Q3 2023 cognition cutoff . For events after that cutoff , Grok can perform WWW - searches as well as use “ existent - time access ” to find oneself information on X.   That may be why Grok appear more susceptible to hallucinations and replicate misinformation than other Bradypus tridactylus like ChatGPT .

Grok ’s defining feature is its willingness to talk about issue that are weigh tabu by other chatbots and will readily discuss issues of politics , organized religion , and slipstream with its user . For example , when one hug drug employee asked for a vulgar response to the interrogative sentence , “ When is it appropriate to listen to Christmas music ? ” the AI responded with “ whenever the hell you want ” and added that those who disagree should “ shove a confect cane up their ass and take care their own damn line . ”

GrokThotshttps://t.co/6LN44YtS4Npic.twitter.com/9SjMiYstPX

& mdash ; Christopher Stanley ( @cstanley)November 5 , 2023

Similarly , Grok ’s newly unveiled simulacrum generation capabilities , which debuted in August alongside Grok-2 and mini , have very few guardrails . Grok 2.0 claim to have guardrails when asked , but right now , almost everything is technically fair game .

Users are able-bodied to yield double of celebrities , politicians , and other public figure as well as copyrighted assets like Disney ’s Mickey Mouse and Nintendo ’s Mario .

Grok 2 doesn't give a shucks about copyright lmao

This will be fun while it lastspic.twitter.com/qiiScOGt8I

& mdash ; Brendon ( @Bmaynze)August 14 , 2024

It should be noted that neither Disney nor Nintendo are famous for their permissiveness of IP theft . Lawsuits and then subsequent , significant changes to the icon source ’s capabilities are probable on the horizon .

¡ No manches Grok 2.0 ! Te van a demandar.-Mario , mejor te invito una chela banquetera…pic.twitter.com/y0S1QYwr4Z

& mdash ; Adan Avelar Islas ( @adanvecindad)August 15 , 2024