Dec 10, 2024

Grok gears up to become a more serious competitor in the AI space. NurPhoto / Contributor / Getty Images Since acquiring X, Elon Musk has been juicing up the platform with artificial intelligence (AI) using its Grok assistant offering. Over the past week, the platform gained a new AI image generator and expanded access to its AI chatbot . The Grok AI chatbot on X has been limited to Premium users. However, as first spotted by  The Verge , starting on Friday, free users began noticing that they had also been given access to the Grok 2 chatbot, with the ability to send up to 10 Grok messages every two hours. At the time of writing this article, from my free X account , I could access the chatbot, which has a similar UI to ChatGPT . When I asked, "What is the biggest news of the day? ", I was met with a reliable answer that made sense and was linked to the posts and web pages from which it retrieved its answer. On Saturday, Grok also debuted a new image generator, dubbed Aurora, which produced extremely photorealistic results, as seen by  user generations  shared to X. Like the generations made by Black Forest's Flux.1 on X , there seemed to be little safeguards to what could be generated on the platform. TechCrunch  had the chance to play with the model, and although nudes were blocked, copyrighted and graphic material was not, with the model generating an "image of a bloodied [Donald] Trump". After a few hours of being live, the generator was taken down from Grok. However, the model isn't gone altogether. On Monday, xAI announced in a release that it has enhanced Grok's image generation abilities with a new model, Aurora, trained on billions of examples from the internet to excel at photorealistic renditions and prompt fidelity. "Aurora is an autoregressive mixture-of-experts network trained to predict the next token from interleaved text and image data," said the release. The new Aurora model will also be able to take images as inputs. However, xAI shares this ability will be rolled out to users on X "soon", with no definitive date. It seems as if the safeguards on this new model will remain loose, with the sample generations in the release including "Jackie Chan in Donald Trump's hairstyle" and "Elon Musk as a Ghibli character." The company shares that Grok's new capabilities will roll out to all users within a week. When visiting Grok 2 from my free account, it still reads, "Images are generated with FLUX.1 by Black Forest Labs," which I attribute to the updated version not rolling out to me yet. Artificial Intelligence