X expands access to Grok chatbot for premium subscribers amid competition

Social media platform X is expanding access to xAI’s Grok chatbot, now making it available to premium subscribers. Following Elon Musk’s recent announcement of a broader offering of the service to paying subscribers, the company outlined that only Premium and Premium+ subscribers will be eligible to interact with the chatbot in specific regions.

Previously, Grok was only available to Premium+ users, who paid a $16 monthly or $168 annual subscription fee. However, according to the latest update, users who subscribe for $8 per month can now use the chatbot’s features. Report Provided by Techcrunch.

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Users can use Grok in regular or entertainment mode

Grok provides users with two different interaction modes: “regular mode” and “entertainment mode”. As with any other large language model (LLM) product, be aware that Grok may provide inaccurate responses.

Recent enhancements include a new Explore view in Grok, where the chatbot succinctly summarizes popular news stories. Noteworthy competitors such as Jeff Bezos and NVIDIA-backed Perplexity AI offer similar news summarization capabilities.

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What makes Grok unique, however, is not just summarizing the story, but also crafting the headlines. However, as Mashable reports, concerns were raised when the chatbot generated a fictitious headline “Iran hits Tel Aviv with heavy missiles.”

Obviously, Musk’s goal is to expand Grok’s user base to compete with products such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude. Musk’s recent criticism of OpenAI’s operations, which culminated in a March lawsuit over alleged “betrayal” of its nonprofit mission, has highlighted the competitive landscape.

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It’s worth noting that xAI recently made Grok open source but did not disclose details about its training data. As my colleague Devin Coldewey highlights, the move raises questions about the model’s transparency and the company’s approach to development.

Amid the competitive dynamics of AI-powered chatbots, as Grok continues to evolve, the industry expects to learn more about Grok’s development and data transparency.