Elon Musk has just announced that xAI's chatbot, Grok, will soon be accessible to all premium subscribers of the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter. Musk revealed this development in a post on X, withholding further details. Previously, Grok was exclusively available to Premium+ subscribers. This comes after Musk open-sourced Grok earlier this month, following a legal dispute with OpenAI over allegations of diverging from its original mission towards a for-profit approach.
In his post on X talking about GrokAI being available to more users soon, Musk wrote, "Later this week, Grok will be enabled for all premium subscribers (not just premium+)."
As mentioned already, GrokAI was recently made open-sourced and an open release was made available on GitHub. Open-sourcing an AI model means offering its source code to the public for modification and redistribution. Thus, open-sourcing GrokAI will let researchers and developers work with the model and improve Grok's xAI abilities, enabling it to keep up with other tech companies like OpenAI, Meta, Google, and others.
xAI had published a blog post that announced that GrokAI is now open-sourced. The blog post said that the xAI team is "releasing the base model weights and network architecture of Grok-1, a large language model."
The blog post also mentioned that people who are interested in using the model need to follow instructions on Github.
Grok AI was unveiled in November last year and was introduced as an AI assistant that will answer questions with "wit and also has a rebellious streak." The XAI team wrote in a tweet that those who lack a sense of humour shouldn’t use the chatbot.
The team's post read, "Grok is an AI modelled after the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, so intended to answer almost anything and, far harder, even suggest what questions to ask. Grok is designed to answer questions with a bit of wit and has a rebellious streak, so please don’t use it if you hate humour."
The team also added that Grok will have real-time knowledge of the world due to X. This could mean that the AI system will derive its knowledge from the users’ publicly available X posts.
In addition to this, the AI system was also said to "answer spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems."
In December, the chatbot was made available to X Premium+ users. Now that all premium subscribers have access to the chatbot, it will be interesting to see how they interact with it and share their experiences.
