Social platform X is extending access to xAI’s Grok chatbot to Premium tier subscribers following an announcement by Elon Musk last month. According to the company’s support page, only Premium and Premium+ users in specific regions can engage with the chatbot.
Before this update, Grok was solely accessible to Premium+ users, who subscribed either monthly for $16 or annually for $168. Now, with this improvement, subscribers on the $8 monthly plan can also access the chatbot.
Grok provides users with two modes: “Regular” and “Fun.” Similar to other large language model (LLM) offerings, Grok includes labels to signal possible inaccuracies in its replies.
Recently, X introduced an explore view within Grok, allowing users to access summaries of trending news stories. This feature puts Grok in league with Jeff Bezos and Nvidia-backed Perplexity AI, both of which also provide news summaries.
Grok appears to take a step beyond mere story summarization by generating headlines, as highlighted by a report from Mashable which cited an instance where the chatbot fabricated a headline claiming “Iran Strikes Tel Aviv with Heavy Missiles.”
Elon Musk appears keen on expanding Grok’s user base to compete with other products like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, or Anthropic’s Claude. Musk has been publicly critical of OpenAI’s operations in recent months and even filed a lawsuit against the company in March, alleging a deviation from its nonprofit objectives. In response, OpenAI has moved to dismiss Musk’s claims and released email correspondence between him and the organization.
Last month, xAI made Grok open source, though without disclosing details of its training data. However, as my colleague Devin Coldewey has pointed out, questions linger regarding whether this represents the latest iteration of the model and whether the company intends to enhance transparency regarding its development approach and training data.
