Tech billionaire and X boss Elon Musk has announced that Grok, the chatbot developed by his artificial intelligence (AI) startup xAI, will be available for all premium subscribers of X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. With a growing number of advertisers shifting away from the microblogging platform, the billionaire emphasises the need to lessen the company's dependence on advertising and is now concentrating on developing more appealing subscription plans.
"We are releasing the weights and architecture of our 314 billion parameter Mixture-of-Experts model, Grok-1,” the company wrote in a blog post.
Notably, earlier this month, Musk announced that xAI would make Grok open-source, following his lawsuit against ChatGPT creator OpenAI for purportedly straying from its initial mission in favor of a profit-driven approach. This decision could grant the public free access to explore the underlying code of the technology, bringing xAI in line with tech giants such as Meta and France's Mistral, both of which have embraced open-source AI models.
To recall, Musk-owned generative AI chatbot, Grok AI, expanded its availability to India and 46 other nations, including Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Singapore, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, among others, in December last year. X had mentioned that Grok AI chatbot access was progressively reaching Premium+ subscribers in the US, at the time of expanding Grok AI globally.
The announcement regarding the global rollout was initially made on December 14, and later, the AI tool was made accessible to anyone willing to subscribe to X Premium+ for up to Rs 2,600 per month, as access to Grok is exclusive to subscribers of X Premium+.
It should be noted that priced at Rs 2,299 per month or Rs 22,900 annually, Grok AI's subscription fee far surpasses that of ChatGPT Plus when accessed through a smartphone (priced at $20 or roughly Rs 1,650 per month -- nearly double). However, for users opting to subscribe via a desktop and availing of the X Premium+ package, the monthly cost is reduced to Rs 1,300, with an annual commitment of Rs 13,600.