In a groundbreaking development, xAI, owned by Elon Musk, has launched Grok-2 and Grok-2 mini in beta today. The new Grok AI model now boasts image generation capabilities on the X social network. However, access to Grok remains exclusive to Premium and Premium+ users on X.
xAI announced that both Grok-2 and Grok-2 mini are available to users on X in beta. “We are excited to release an early preview of Grok-2, a significant step forward from our previous model Grok-1.5, featuring frontier capabilities in chat, coding, and reasoning. At the same time, we are introducing Grok-2 mini, a small but capable sibling of Grok-2. An early version of Grok-2 has been tested on the LMSYS leaderboard under the name ‘sus-column-r’,” stated xAI’s blog post about Grok-2.
Musk’s AI company plans to make both models available to developers through its enterprise API later this month. Early images generated by users suggest that Grok’s image generation feature lacks guardrails around creating images of political figures, and many users are currently exploiting this. With the U.S. presidential election approaching, the company will likely face pressure to add limits to these features.
Few details are available on Grok 2’s actual capabilities at the moment. App researcher and X feature tester Nima Owji claimed that Grok 2 excels at code generation, writing, and news, though there isn’t much evidence to support this yet. Grok’s first version has previously made errors while summarizing news.
No restrictions on image generation
Without any restrictions on image generation, Grok could become a tool for creating misinformation on X and other platforms. It’s unclear if Grok-powered images embed metadata indicating they are AI-generated.
We have reached out to X for their plans on limiting image generation for harmful purposes and will update the story upon receiving a response. However, the company has seldom responded to media inquiries since Musk’s takeover.
xAI noted plans to deploy Grok-2 and Grok-2 mini in AI-driven features on X, including improved search capabilities, post analytics, and reply functions. This could mean that X might introduce AI-powered replies. The company also said it will release a preview of multimodal understanding as a core part of Grok’s experience on X and API.
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