Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence (AI) company, xAI, launched an image generation model this week, just as its Sam Altman-led competitor OpenAI unveiled its highly anticipated video generation model called Sora.

On Monday, xAI announced the news in a blog post on its website, highlighting that X users in select countries already have access to the tool, while it plans to roll out the feature to all users within a week. The model can receive input in the form of text or other images and claims to be able to produce high-quality images in many scenarios where other models struggle.

The company writes the following in the web post:

We’ve improved Grok’s imaging capabilities with a new model, codenamed Aurora. Aurora is an autoregressive expert network trained to predict the next token from nested text and image data. We trained the model using billions of examples from the internet, giving it a deep understanding of the world. This means that it is characterized by a photorealistic representation and the precise following of text instructions. Beyond text, the model also has native support for multimodal input, allowing it to draw inspiration from user-provided images or edit them directly.

Despite being introduced as “Aurora,” Musk responded to the news that xAI plans to ditch the name, preferring instead to just use the name Grok, which was used for its text-only model.

“Note: We are deleting the name of the internal @xAI imaging system (Aurora),” Musk wrote in a post on X. “Just think of Grok as doing everything.”

Below you can see some examples of the images from the Grok image generation.

Photo credit: xAI

Photo credit: xAI

Photo credit: xAI

Photo credit: xAI

Photo credit: xAI

Photo credit: xAI

Grok was originally launched by xAI last November and offered as a benefit to X Premium Plus users.

The company later open-sourced the model, which coincided with Musk’s criticism of OpenAI for abandoning its original nonprofit mission and not open-sourcing its own model, ChatGPT . In April, xAI also launched Grok 1.5V as the first model with visual computing power.

xAI is currently upgrading a newly built supercomputing cluster called Colossus in Memphis, Tennessee, where the company plans to eventually house 200,000 Nvidia H100 and H200 GPUs. The site, which was built in just 122 days and went live in July, currently houses 100,000 GPUs, and Musk said last week that the cluster would eventually contain up to a million of them.

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