• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, December 8, 2023

X is rolling out its ChatGPT rival Grok to Premium+ subscribers. The chatbot incorporates real-time data from X into responses from queries.

The artificial intelligence venture xAI -- founded by Elon Musk in July 2023 -- developed Grok, now available to users in the U.S. with the expectation to launch in other countries soon.

Not all U.S. Premium+ subscribers have access to Grok.

Longer-term subscribers are prioritized in this rollout, according to an X post. All X users are expected to have access by the end of next week.

“You can find Grok in the side menu on web, iOS, and Android (app must be up to date) on iOS & Android, you can add it to your bottom menu for easy access,” according to a post on X.  “don’t forget your towel!”

Grok is a conversational chatbot that draws on real-time information from Musk’s X platform and integrates it into responses.

It pulls from real-time news based on X posts. It works similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT used by Microsoft, Google’s Bard, and Anthropic’s Claude. It was trained on data from the web, up to Q3 2023, and feedback from human assistants, and powered by a large language model (LLM) called Grok-1.

Grok pieces together a response from very recent headlines, but it’s not clear how it makes the selection of content or how often it might yield incorrect answers.

Bindu Reddy, CEO of Abacus.AI, believes people are “vastly underestimating the power of real-time data. She reposted a post from Robert Scoble, AI engineer and tech evangelist. The post shows a comparison of the same query from Grok and Bard.

While Grok in the post describes the events of the day, such as the launch of Google Gemini and how Alibaba’s video AI scrapes TikTok data, Bard answers the questions with a summary of IBM Quantum advances, and Android’s AI developments.  

X, formerly known as Twitter, was originally built on the promise of real-time information that would flow through the platform and integrate into search results.

Google was the first to tap Twitter results and integrate them into mobile in early 2015.