X makes AI Chatbot Grok available for free – What you should know about the change
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X makes AI Chatbot Grok available for free – What you should know about the change

Posted on by Amelia Pressman

Topline

X, formerly known as Twitter, has launched a free and limited tier of its chatbot Grok, giving users access to the AI ​​tool after previously locking it up for a premium subscription.

Important facts

X opened the chatbot to non-premium users on Friday, although there are limitations to queries and other features provided by Grok.

Free users can ask Grok up to 10 questions every two hours and are limited to three image analyzes and four image generations per day, according to the chatbot.

Users with X’s Premium and Premium+ subscriptions, which cost $7 and $14 per month respectively, have expanded access to Grok (up to 50 questions per day).

If you want to use the chatbot without an X account, you must have an account that is at least seven days old and linked to a phone number.

Grok has made a name for itself as a conversational chatbot. However, the AI ​​assistant can also help users research and break down current topics, provide coding assistance, and be used to automatically process customer queries for users’ businesses.

X has not released an official statement about the rollout and did not immediately respond to Forbes’ request for comment.

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How many users does Grok have?

Grok’s user numbers have not been publicly disclosed, although the chatbot itself said that the user base could be estimated in the millions, citing unofficial estimates from X users. Grok’s free tier could potentially increase the number of users of the AI ​​tool, which is likely to be dwarfed by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which has 300 million active weekly users. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Friday that his company’s chatbot has nearly 600 million monthly active users since its launch just over a year ago.

Important background

Grok is the flagship product of xAI, Elon Musk’s AI company, which was founded in 2023 and is now valued at $50 billion, competing with OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft, Anthropic and other AI companies. In addition to being led by Musk, the world’s richest person, XAI has the advantage of training AI models based on data sourced from X and Tesla. The latter provides visual data collected by its car cameras. xAI also has extensive computing capabilities through its recently constructed supercomputer site in Memphis, Tennessee, which will be expanded with at least 1 million graphics processing units to increase computer workload and train AI models. The site was created in just 122 days and was praised by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who said this week that he expects xAI to be “a really serious competitor.”

Further reading

What we know about xAI as it gears up for AI competition with $6 billion in new funding (Forbes)

Inside Elon Musk’s Crazy Push to Build a Giant xAI Supercomputer in Memphis (Forbes)

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