Billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk has confirmed that his company’s AI chatbot, Grok, will soon be accessible to all X premium users. Musk announced this on Tuesday, showing a big increase in Grok’s availability. This comes at a time when tensions between Musk and his former project, OpenAI, are rising.
Musk, who also owns xAI, said that Grok AI will be open to all X premium users later this week. This comes after Musk took legal action against OpenAI. Musk claimed that they were not using AI for the good of humanity as originally intended.
OpenAI’s popular chatbot, ChatGPT has been under scrutiny from Musk. He called the San Francisco-based company “closed AI” during the ongoing legal battles. Musk’s xAI has been moving towards open-source AI, similar to big companies like Mistral and Meta.
Grok AI, created by Musk last year, is a new chatbot. It presents itself as an alternative to well-known chatbots like Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Grok is inspired by Douglas Adams’ famous sci-fi novel, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It adds humor and a rebellious spirit to its responses.
Previously, Grok was exclusively offered as part of the X Premium+ subscription, which costs $15 per month or $164 per year. But following Musk’s recent announcement, users subscribed to the X Premium package, priced at $8 per month or $82 per year, will now also have access to Grok AI. However, Musk hasn’t confirmed whether Grok AI will eventually become accessible to all X users, similar to ChatGPT version 3.5.
According to TechCrunch’s reports, Musk’s decision to grant all premium subscribers access to Grok AI is perceived as a strategic move. His goal is to increase X’s subscriber numbers amidst a noted decline in usage. Data from Sensor Tower, reveals an 18% year-on-year drop in X usage in the US as of February. Since Musk assumed leadership, there has been an additional 23% decrease.
Later this week, Grok will be enabled for all premium subscribers (not just premium+) https://t.co/4u9lbLwe23
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 26, 2024
Furthermore, Musk’s struggles with advertisers have prompted many of the top 100 US advertisers on X to shift their advertising budgets elsewhere. This further increases the financial challenges faced by the platform.
In another report, GrokAI has recently been open-sourced, with its source code released on GitHub for public access. This move will enable developers and researchers to collaborate on improving Grok’s xAI capabilities, thus keeping it competitive with other technology companies like OpenAI, Google, Meta, and more.
