Grok is a generative AI chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s AI company, XAI. It was introduced the first time in November 2023 and now serves users with a Premium subscription to X (formerly Twitter). So, what exactly can Grok do? In today’s article, we’ll discover its key features and underlying technology, coupled with its potential impact on our society. We also make a detailed comparison between Grok and other popular AI chatbots. Now, let’s dive in!
Elon Musk and xAI: The Driving Force Behind Grok
Elon Musk is known for innovation across industries, from electric vehicles with Tesla to interplanetary travel with SpaceX. Not only in hardware, but Musk also gets involved in the world of artificial intelligence (AI). He believes AI has the potential to transform our lives. However, he also harbors significant concerns about this technology’s inherent risks.
Elon Musk’s Vision for AI
Musk’s philosophy on AI originated from a deep sense of both awe and caution. He recognized the transformative benefit of AI in handling complex problems and improving human lives. However, he was also increasingly concerned about its potential of becoming super-intelligent and threatening society.
To ensure AI safety, Musk felt that AI chatbots should be tied closely to humans. In other words, they should be open-source, so that many people can develop their own bots based on its source code, instead of completely depending on big corporations for these bots.
Sharing this vision with Sam Altman, Musk co-founded OpenAI – an American AI research organization – in 2015. However, this cooperation soon ended three years later as they no longer shared the same voice on AI development.
Further, Musk felt that many existing AI labs were focusing on short-term commercial applications, rather than long-term ethical considerations. Also, he worried that if AI models and chatbots are mainly controlled by large corporations like Google, they can become politically “brainwashed.” Further, he believed that self-learning AI models could be opposed to human beings, and trained to “attack” X with disinformation or biased reporting one day.
So, he decided to found an AI company in the pursuit of open and truthful AI research. He believes that AI should be responsible and transparent, especially in explaining clearly their reasoning and decision-making.
xAI’s Mission and Team
In March 2023, xAI was founded with the overarching goal of “understanding the true nature of the universe.” The company also aims at developing AI models that excel at mathematical reasoning, something that eludes current models as of 2023. Elon Musk also positioned his new firm as “less political,” with the trajectory of AI development in a libertarian direction.
To achieve this goal, xAI has built a team of highly skilled and experienced AI researchers. They have impressive technical achievements in multiple fields, like machine learning, deep learning, and natural language processing.
The Connection Between Elon Musk and Grok
Grok is a direct reflection of Elon Musk’s vision for AI.
Its ability to access and handle real-time information from X meets Musk’s expectations about open-source and genuine AI. By offering the latest insights and information, Grok allows users to make informed decisions.
Besides, Musk has also got involved in shaping Grok’s humor and personality which are clearly defined in its answers. This reflects Musk’s desire to build a conversational AI chatbot that is capable of communicating with human beings naturally and intuitively. Plus, Elon Musk has actively participated in the promotion of the chatbot on social media.
Musk’s personal investment in this chatbot highlights his commitment to creating AI that is not only intelligent and powerful but also useful and safe for humans.
Grok’s Evolution
Before diving deep into Elon Musk’s Grok, we’ll take a quick overview of how this young chatbot has grown up.
This intelligent chatbot was introduced for the first time by xAI on November 4, 2023. At that time, its first version, Grok-1, was only available for only X’s Premium+ subscribers. xAI has used a custom tech stack like a coding language Rust, machine learning framework JAX, and software management system Kubernetes to build Grok faster. Further, Grok-1 was trained on vast datasets from the Internet, whether they’re scientific papers or Wikipedia articles.
In March 2024, xAI made Grok-1 open-source under the Apache-2.0 license. Also at this time, this Grok version was accessible to all X’s Premium subscribers. At the end of March 2024, xAI released the Grok-1.5 version with enhanced reasoning capabilities. However, five months later, the second version was made public with enhanced capabilities like image generation, web search, and PDF interpretation.
On February 17, 2025, xAI continued to debut its latest flagship Grok version, Grok-3. This new version was trained on an expanded database and added with new functionalities like advanced web searching (with DeepSearch) and advanced reasoning through more complex problems. With these new capabilities, Grok-3 was claimed to outperform its current competitors like OpenAI’s GPT-4o and DeepSeek on mathematical reasoning and science problems.
At first, Grok-3 was only available to subscribers to X’s Premium+ and xAI’s SuperGrok. But now, it’s made accessible to everyone (but only for a short time!). But paid users can gain access to more advanced features like Voice Mode.
Grok’s Key Features and Functionality
Like other AI chatbots, Elon Musk’s Grok provides a wide range of functionalities to help users handle different tasks. Now, let’s take a look at its five main features:
1. Access to X (formerly Twitter) Data
What sets Grok apart from its competitors is its direct connection to the social media platform X. In other words, this intelligent chatbot can scan real-time posts on X, offering the latest information and insights on breaking news, trending topics, and user discussions.
Like in the example below posted by xAI, Grok leverages the DeepSearch functionality to dive deep into X’s posts and answer the question, “What are users on X saying about the Grok 3 launch?” The chatbot takes around 38 seconds for a deep search, providing a detailed analysis and interpretations (including supporting ideas and examples).
With this capability, Grok provides your business with immediate insights into emerging topics and public sentiment about your brand or offerings. It also offers contextually relevant answers to help you make informed decisions.
However, be careful with what Grok can tell you. As Grok’s analytics depends heavily on X’s posts, its responses may be biased or misleading if the information on X is unverified, inaccurate, or harmful.
2. “A Bit of Wit” and Humor
Grok has two interaction modes: “Fun” and “Regular.” The former is by default. This means the chatbot can inject humorous personality into its responses and therefore, deliver factually inaccurate answers at times. The Fun Mode is also what makes Grok different from other AI chatbots. But if you prefer something serious and prioritize more accurate responses, you may switch to the Regular Mode.
3. Ability to Answer “Spicy Questions”
Grok is defined to possibly answer almost anything, even sensitive or controversial topics that other AI chatbots avoid. Elon Musk shared an example of how Grok showed a step-by-step guide to make the infamous white power (or “cocaine”). The guide, according to Grok, is for “educational purposes,” and it discourages any illegal activity if users don’t want to get trouble.
4. Reasoning
As already mentioned, Elon Musk aimed to build an AI model that is not only powerful and intelligent but also responsible and transparent. Therefore, his firm, xAI, always strives to enhance Grok’s ability to reason through complex problems.
Accordingly, they focus on “Think” and “Big Brain” modes that allow Grok to engage deeply in reasoning processes. The former functionality is now available on the Grok-3 model for all users, while the latter is only accessible to paid users, handling more complex problems by using extra computational resources. These functionalities help users better understand why they conduct a specific analysis or make a certain decision.
5. Multimodal Capabilities
Previously, Grok only accepted text inputs. This was a big disadvantage of Grok compared to its competitors like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Microsoft Copilot. However, Grok now has multimodal capabilities. This means the chatbot can process and interpret information from different sources, not only text but also diagrams and other visual forms of data. By combining text and visual information, Grok can provide a better understanding of the context behind these sources. Now, X subscribers can gain access to these multimodal functionalities.
How to Use Grok
There are two ways you can access and use Grok.
X Platform Integration: Grok 3 is now incorporated directly into the X social media platform and available to even all free users. Therefore, you only need to sign in to your X account (or create a new account if you don’t have one), look at the left column, and access Grok. In case you want to access the full capabilities of the Grok model, you should subscribe to an X Premium package.
Grok Website/App: xAI also releases a Grok website and an application for both iOS and Android. These versions enable the use of Grok 2 and 3 outside the X platform. Accordingly, you can sign in to Grok through your X or Google accounts, and access some advanced features like Image Generation, Think, or DeepSearch.
Grok vs. Other AI Chatbots: A Comparative Analysis
The AI chatbot landscape is thriving, with new players like Grok actively participating in the game. In comparison, each comes with strengths and weaknesses, providing users with different experiences and purposes. Now, we’ll bring Grok, ChatGPT, and Gemini to the table to see how Grok stacks up against the other AI assistants:
Data Sources
As already mentioned, Grok uses real-time information from X and other websites. Meanwhile, ChatGPT mainly depends on a large dataset of text and code from the Internet. This source is static and doesn’t inherently cover real-time access. Gemini can access Google’s massive knowledge and automatically browse hundreds of websites for updated information. Compared with Grok, ChatGPT and Gemini can’t access social media platforms to gain instant insights.
Personality and Tone
Grok aims for a more engaging tone, therefore it has humor and a bit of wit. However, this unique personality makes Grok offer more irrelevant and even controversial responses at times.
ChatGPT often keeps a more neutral and formal tone as it focuses on helpful and accurate information. The same also applies to Gemini. This AI-powered assistant is multimodal and versatile. So, it can process a variety of tasks, from creating text to interpreting visual or audio data. For this reason, it also focuses on providing factual information. Having said that, you can add a more intriguing and humorous tone to the content generated by these chatbots through prompts.
Reasoning
In its live event of debuting Grok 3 in early 2025, xAI claimed that Grok 3 won over GPT-4o and Gemini-2 Pro on benchmarks like AIME (which assesses how models perform on math problems), GPQA (which evaluates a model’s performance on PhD-level scientific problems), and LCB (which examines a model’s coding capabilities).
When we conduct some experimental tests with Grok, we recognize Grok offers a detailed explanation for its analysis and decision. The interpretation is backed up by up-to-date information from websites and posts on the X platform.
Grok’s reasoning capability
Gemini also has that capability. Its 2.0 Flash Thinking versions offer a detailed reasoning process to explain why Gemini “thinks.” Deeply integrating the Google ecosystem, Gemini also supports deep searches on YouTube, Maps, and a search engine to generate more accurate content.
Gemini’s reasoning capability
The same also applies to ChatGPT, which provides a detailed reasoning process for our question. However, with a free forever plan, both Gemini and ChatGPT don’t offer any real-time information to back up their ideas.
ChatGPT’s reasoning capability
Conclusion
Grok is a new player in the AI assistant playground. However, it has come with amazing capabilities, focusing on resolving problems related to the X platform, mathematics, science, and programming.
According to industry experts (as we asked Grok!), the future of this chatbot is promising if Grok’s creators can resolve data privacy and technical problems. However, when more and more companies are investing in AI, especially virtual assistants and chatbots, the competition in this realm definitely becomes more intense. Having said that, we’re still eager to see the upcoming story of Grok and how Elon Musk with his firm makes this intelligent chatbot stand out.
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