Grok, Elon Musk’s AI chatbot that was previously available only to Premium+ subscribers on X, is rolling out to a wider audience.
On Tuesday the X CEO announced the AI assistant will be available to Premium subscribers “later this week”.
Previously Grok was only available to X users paying for the top tier of Premium, which is a not-exactly-cheap $16 a month (Premium is $8 a month). And while some Premium+ users don’t seem too happy to be losing their exclusive access, Grok’s wider rollout seems to be in line with Musk’s recent decision to make the chatbot open source.
It’s worth noting, of course, that the open source version of Grok isn’t the same Grok that X users have access to. The model released on Github is from an October 2023 “pre-training” phase.
Musk has a complicated relationship with AI. He recently sued OpenAI, a company he previously sat on the board for, arguing that the ChatGPT creators breached contract by not making their product open source. OpenAI then hit back, publishing emails from Musk that indicate he knew about the company’s plans to stop publicly sharing its work. What a mess.