Elon Musk’s X (formerly known as Twitter) has rolled out a free, limited-tier version of its AI chatbot, Grok, in a move to broaden its user base. This offering, which was previously locked behind a premium subscription, is now accessible to non-premium users, albeit with certain restrictions.
On Friday, users discovered that the chatbot, developed by Musk’s AI company xAI, is available to free-tier subscribers, allowing them to send up to 10 messages to Grok every two hours. The free version also includes limited access to image-related features, with users able to analyse up to three images and generate four new ones per day.
For X’s Premium subscribers, which include those paying $7 for Premium and $14 for Premium+, access to Grok is more extensive, allowing up to 50 questions per day. Users must also have an X account that is at least seven days old and linked to a phone number to access the free-tier chatbot.
Grok, which xAI launched in 2023 as a “humorous AI assistant”, was initially exclusive to Premium users of X. The chatbot was enhanced in August with a text-to-image generation tool, though it quickly gained attention for producing some controversial images. A month later, xAI began testing a free version of Grok in select regions, and the current update expands that availability.
Grok’s capabilities go beyond casual conversation. It can assist with research, coding support, and even automate customer service for businesses. While xAI has not disclosed exact user numbers, unofficial estimates suggest that Grok’s user base could be in the millions, a number that could grow with the introduction of the free tier.
The free-tier rollout is seen as a strategic effort to compete with other popular, no-cost chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Microsoft’s Copilot, and Anthropic’s Claude. These competitors have established a significant presence in the AI space, with OpenAI reporting 300 million active weekly users, and Meta’s chatbot boasting nearly 600 million monthly active users.
Grok is the flagship product of xAI, which was founded by Musk in 2023 and is currently valued at $50 billion. The company’s AI offerings have an edge due to the vast amounts of data collected from X and Tesla, the latter contributing visual data from its car cameras. xAI also has substantial computing power, thanks to a newly built supercomputer in Memphis, Tennessee, which is being expanded to further scale up AI training.