X increases availability of Grok chatbot for premium subscribers in response to growing competition

Social media platform X is now making xAI’s Grok chatbot available to Premium tier subscribers. In response to Elon Musk’s announcement about the service being offered to paid users, the company has specified that only Premium and Premium+ subscribers in certain regions will have access to the chatbot.

Previously, Grok was exclusively available to Premium+ users, who paid either $16 per month or a $168 annual subscription fee. However, according to a report by Techcrunch, with the latest update, users who have subscribed for $8 per month can now take advantage of the chatbot’s features.

Users can practice Grok in normal or fun mode

Grok offers users two distinct modes of interaction: “regular mode” and “fun mode”. As with any other LLM product, users are cautioned that Grok may provide inaccurate answers.

A recent improvement includes Grok’s new research view, where the chatbot summarizes trending news. Notable competitors such as Jeff Bezos and NVIDIA-backed Perplexity AI also offer similar news summary features.

Still, Grok excels not only in summarizing stories, but also in creating headlines. However, this has raised concerns, as seen when a chatbot created the fictitious headline “Iran Strikes Tel Aviv with Heavy Missiles,” as reported by Mashable.

Clearly, Musk is looking to expand Grok’s user base to compete with products like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude. Musk’s recent criticism of OpenAI’s operations, which culminated in a March lawsuit alleging “fraud” of its nonprofit mission, underscores the competitive landscape.

Notably, XAI recently open-sourced Grok, albeit without disclosing details of its training data. This move has raised questions about the model’s transparency and the company’s approach to development, as my colleague Devin Coldewey pointed out.

Amid the competitive dynamics of AI-based chatbots, the industry is waiting for more insights into Grok’s development and data transparency as it grows.