Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of xAI, announced on Tuesday that Grok, the AI chatbot developed by his company, will be accessible to all X premium customers later this week. The action is taken in the midst of a growing conflict between Musk and OpenAI, his previous business. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, and Elon Musk recently faced legal action for deviating from the startup’s primary goal of creating artificial intelligence for the good of humanity.
It is noteworthy that since the lawsuit, Musk has been critical of OpenAI and its flagship product, ChatGPT, even going so far as to refer to the San Francisco-based business as “closed AI”. Musk’s xAI recently made the decision to open source Grok AI under the Apace 2.0 license, joining the ranks of Meta and Mistral.
How does one utilize Grok, and what is it?
In November of last year, Musk introduced Grok AI as a rival to the widely used chatbots on the market, such as ChatGPT and Gemini (previously Bard). The chatbot, which was designed to respond to queries with a “rebellious streak” and a hint of humor, was modeled after Douglas Adams’ science fiction book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Grok was previously only accessible with an X Premium+ subscription, which runs consumers ₹1,300 a month or ₹13,600 annually.
Nevertheless, Grok AI users will now be able to communicate with it even with an X Premium subscription, which costs ₹6,800 annually or ₹650 per month. Musk hasn’t said when or whether Grok AI will be available to all X users, similar to how ChatGPT version 3.5 is accessible to them.
As per a TechCrunch article, Musk’s move to provide Grok access to all premium users might be a component of his plan to enhance X’s subscriber base in light of decreasing utilization reports. According to the article, which used data from Sensor Tower, X usage in the US decreased by 18% year over year in February and has decreased by 23% since Musk took over the business.
Furthermore, 75 of the top 100 US marketers on X have stopped spending any money on ads on the social networking platform due to Musk’s issues with sponsors.
