"xAI's chatbot 'Grok' to be launched to X Premium+ subscribers next week"

Shortly after screenshots of xAI's chatbot Grok appeared on X's web application, X owner Elon Musk confirmed that Grok will be available to all of the company's Premium+ subscribers "next week." While Musk's statements on product delivery timelines are not always reliable, code development in X's own application indicates that integration of Grok is already underway.

This week, application researcher Nima Owji shared screenshots showing that Grok has been added to X's web application, with its URL set to twitter.com/i/grok. In one of the screenshots, users who are not yet Premium+ subscribers will be invited to upgrade to gain access to Grok. Another screenshot shows a text input box for "Ask Grok" to interact with the AI chatbot. However, these features were not yet public when he discovered them, but they indicate that Grok is about to be launched.

Grok was first released to selected testers on November 4th, as Musk's response to OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Bard, Anthropic's Claude, and other chatbots, and it may gain some attention as part of X's broader social platform.

In addition, xAI, the development company of Grok, promises that its chatbot will have more personality than its competitors. According to its official website, it plans to answer users' questions in a humorous way and is described as having a "rebellious tendency." The company also plans to answer "spicy" questions that other AI systems refuse to answer.

However, personality alone cannot be the key differentiator for Grok—it will also gain real-time knowledge through the X platform, which may be an interesting component, although its accuracy in answering may not be the highest.

This addition may help drive registrations for X's premium subscription, which currently does not perform as well as Musk hoped. X's owner changed Twitter Blue to X Premium and promised to provide a range of features such as paid verification, increased reply exposure, the addition of an edit button, longer posts and videos, and reduced ad quantity.

Therefore, X recently announced that its premium service will be divided into three tiers: a $3 per month basic subscription (with ads), the existing X Premium subscription for $8 per month, and the Premium+ subscription for $16 per month (removing all ads in "For You" and "Following" feeds and introducing the Creator Center, where users can earn income by publishing content).

Grok will join this higher-priced tier, which may encourage other X users, apart from creators, to register as subscribers.

Although Grok's arrival may not cause dramatic boardroom events like OpenAI, Altman has already noticed its arrival and mocked the chatbot's alleged comedic abilities on Twitter. He posted a screenshot suggesting that GPT "become a chatbot that answers questions with lousy elderly humor" and called it Grok. Musk responded by calling ChatGPT-4 "GPT-Snore" and added, "Humor is clearly banned at OpenAI, just like many other topics that are subject to its censorship."

As an early co-founder of OpenAI, Musk later left the nonprofit organization and canceled his planned donation after Altman and other founders of OpenAI refused his proposal to take over the company. This move led to a public rift between the two key figures, and Musk subsequently founded his own AI company, xAI, hiring senior personnel from Google DeepMind, Google Research, OpenAI, Microsoft Research, and Tesla.

Musk stated that Grok has undergone knowledge base training similar to ChatGPT and Meta's Llama 2 and will leverage real-time information from X. It will also be able to search the web for the latest information on certain topics.