Elon Musk’s xAI launches Grok-2 AI assistant for X

The social media platform X, owned by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, has been upgraded to the beta version of Grok-2, xAI’s new artificial intelligence tool designed for chat, coding, and reasoning.

xAI, an AI startup founded by Musk, introduced the successor to its older generation Grok-1.5 artificial intelligence model for X users on Aug. 13. The Grok-2 beta release includes two language models: Grok-2 and its lesser capable “sibling” Grok-2 mini.

Grok AI search assistant is available to X users with Premium or Premium+ memberships, and is not included for users with standard memberships.

Elon Musk introduces two-tier AI assistant for X

Grok-2 integrates real-time information from X and applies text and vision understanding to solve complex user prompts. Grok-2 mini, on the other hand, is less capable and focuses on speed.

During Grok’s initial release in November 2023, Musk claimed that Grok 1 outperformed OpenAI’s first iteration of ChatGPT in several academic tests. Grok-1.5 was announced on April 12.

Continuing its growth, the beta version of Grok 2 gained notable recognition on Chatbot Arena, a platform that assesses large language models (LLMs) developed by the Large Model Systems Organization (LMSYS Org).

Catching up with ChatGPT and Gemini

As reported by LMSYS Org, Grok 2 matched numerous capabilities of OpenAI’s GPT-4o, which was launched on May 13:

“With over 12,000 community votes, sus-column-r has secured the #3 spot on the overall leaderboard, even matching GPT-4o! It excels in Coding (#2), Hard Prompts (#4), and Math (#2).”

However, ChatGPT-4o is ranked as the best AI assistant in terms of overall capabilities, followed by Google’s Gemini 1.5, which was introduced on Feb. 15.

xAI will make Grok-2 and Grok-2 Mini available to developers through an enterprise API by the end of August.

On May 27, xAI announced a $6 billion Series B funding round that raised its valuation to $24 billion in just 11 months.