Elon Musk’s xAI makes its ChatGPT rival Grok chatbot free for these users – Times of India

Elon Musk‘s artificial intelligence (AI) startup, xAI’s chatbot Grok, is now accessible to all users on social media platform X (earlier Twitter). The Grok AI chatbot which was launched last year was available only to premium subscribers of X. However, the chatbot can now be accessed by free users as well. Last month, Musk’s xAI reportedly started testing a free version of Grok in certain regions. Making Grok free for all users will make the chatbot more widely available and may help it compete with free chatbots that are already available for free. This includes options like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and Anthropic’s Claude. Multiple X users also took to the social media platform to confirm the availability of the Grok chatbot.

We at the TOI Tech desk also tried accessing the Grok chatbot and were able to do the same. The chatbot is available for both the web version and the mobile app. However, free users can send up to 10 messages to Grok every two hours and the chatbot can also generate three images in a day. This expands the availability of the AI chatbot and will allow a wider audience to interact with it.

Grok AI chatbot’s journey so far

Launched last year, Musk-owned xAI introduced AI chatbot Grok as a “humorous AI assistant” which was available exclusively for Premium subscribers. In August, Grok was updated with a text-to-image generation feature that has faced scrutiny for producing controversial images including Taylor Swift in lingerie and US politician Kamala Harris with a gun.
xAI, which was recently valued at $6 billion after its latest funding round, is also considering launching a standalone app for its AI chatbot Grok, reported the Wall Street Journal. This move would put Grok in direct competition with other popular AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, all of which already have their dedicated apps. Currently, Grok is only accessible through X.