• by Colin Kirkland , November 11, 2024

Until now, X's AI chatbot Grok has only been available to the social media platform's premium, paying users.

But according to a recent post, a new, limited version of the program is being offered to non-paying users in select regions, marking a notable push in the company's long-term strategy as it competes with other generative-AI models like ChatGPT, Bard and Gemini.

Since its launch, Grok -- which was built by X owner Elon Musk's venture xAI -- has been available solely to premium X users, drawing on real-time information from X and integrating it into automated responses. The chatbot was trained on data from the web and feedback from human assistants, ultimately powered by a large language model called Grok-1.

Over the summer, X launched Grok-2 and Grok-2 mini, two new chatbot models that include an in-app image generator and upgraded performance, available to the platform's 1.3 million premium users, which makes up about 0.26% of X's total user base.

To lure more people to the app while trying to better compete with other popular AI-powered chatbots in the market, like Google's Bard, OpenAI's ChatGPT, and Anthropic's Claude, X is now testing a “freemium” version of Grok that limits users' usage to 10 queries per two hours with the Grok-2 model, 20 queries per two hours with Grok-2 mini, and three image analysis questions per day, according to various researchers on X.

So far, Musk's AI company has raised $6 billion in funding and has built a massive AI supercomputer cluster called “Colossus,” which is set to increase in size to 200,000 GPUs and will soon feature Nvidi's upcoming H200 GPU to power Grok.

To use Grok for free, users must have an account that is at least seven days old and have a phone number linked to it.