XAI, the artificial intelligence company owned by Elon Musk, has expanded access to its popular chatbot Grok. Starting this month, Grok is available to users who pay for the Premium membership on X’s social network. Only people with the $8 Premium plan or the higher $16 Premium+ plan can chat with Grok in select areas for now.
Before this, only those with the Premium+ membership could use Grok. That more expensive membership costs $16 per month or $168 for a whole year. Now regular Premium members will be able to enjoy chatting with Grok too. When talking to Grok, users have the choice of a “Normal” or “Fun” mode. Like other AI assistants, Grok lets you know it may give wrong answers sometimes.
Grok can now summarize trending news stories directly on X’s platform. One new feature shows headlines and short blurbs about popular topics. But some say Grok went too far when it recently made up a fake news headline! Elon Musk likely wants more users to try Grok so it can compete with chatbots from companies like Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic.
In the past, Musk has been very critical of OpenAI. He even sued them earlier this year over some disagreements. While Grok is now available to more people, questions still remain about transparency into how it works and where it gets its information. As artificial intelligence advances, explaining how systems are built and trained will stay important.
Overall this expansion of Grok access seems aimed at taking on other major chatbots, but transparency will continue to matter for user trust.
