Elon Musk is making his company’s Grok artificial intelligence chatbot available to more people who pay a monthly subscription for X, his social media network.
In a statement published on X, formerly known as Twitter, Musk said he intends to make Grok available to all premium subscribers of the social media site who pay $8 per month. Previously, Grok access had been limited to subscribers who pay $16 per month for X’s premium plus subscription, which removes ads from parts of the website, among other benefits. Musk gave no exact date for the release.
The move is the latest way Musk appears to be ramping up his competition against AI companies, OpenAI in particular. Musk has a long history of both supporting the technology and warning of its destructive possibilities.
In February, Musk sued OpenAI, which he had initially helped to found, accusing the company of breach of contract. In the suit, he said OpenAI was intended to be an open-source, “non-profit lab that would try to catch up to Google in the race for AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), but it would be the opposite of Google.” Instead, OpenAI has become one of the hottest AI companies in the world, and charges $20 per month for access to advanced versions of its popular ChatGPT technology.
In the meantime, Musk has been investing heavily in a competing AI called Grok. The technology, which he said is part of a new effort announced last year called xAI. Grok is currently built into Musk’s X social network, which he bought in 2022 for more than $44 billion.
Why the name Grok?
Grok is an unusual technology, and not just because it has an unusual name. The word “grok” is a term coined by sci-fi writer Robert Heinlein, who used it in his 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land about a human raised by aliens on Mars and then brought back to Earth. Grok is a Martian term, meaning to understand something to the point where it becomes a part of you.
What does this have to do with Musk? Well, grok is a popular term…
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