Grok chatbot now available for premium subscribers

Elon Musk announced last month that social network X was expanding access to its xAI’s Grok chatbot to premium subscribers. According to the company’s support page, only Premium and Premium+ users in select regions can interact with the chatbot.

Premium subscriber access

Previously, Grok was only available to Premium+ users, who paid a $16 monthly or $168 annual subscription fee. With this update, users on the $8 per month plan can now interact with the chatbot. Grok provides users with two modes of interaction: “regular mode” and “entertainment mode”.Like other large language model (LLM) products, Grok reportedly ships with labels indicating possible inaccuracies in its responses technological crisis.

Also read: Musk’s xAI will enable chatbot Grok for all X Premium subscribers

Grok’s role in summarizing news stories

Grok’s latest update includes a new Explore View feature that allows users to access summaries of popular news stories. Notably, Grok goes beyond mere summaries to also generate headlines, as evidenced by an article from Mashable in which the chatbot generated a false headline about Iran attacking Tel Aviv with a heavy missile.

Elon Musk’s push to grow Grok’s user base may be an effort to position it as a competitor to other conversational AI products like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. Musk has been publicly critical of OpenAI’s practices, even suing the company in March for straying from its nonprofit goals. In response, OpenAI sought to dismiss Musk’s claims and published email exchanges between Musk and the company.

Last month, xAI made Grok open source but did not provide details on the training data used. The move raises questions about the transparency of the model development process and the availability of training data, as highlighted by concerns expressed by my colleague Devin Coldewey.

X’s decision to extend access to the Grok chatbot to Premium subscribers reflects Elon Musk’s ambition to challenge the established players in conversational AI, while raising questions about transparency and accountability in AI development.

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