Grok (chatbot)
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| Grok | |
|---|---|
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Screenshot  Screenshot of Grok 3 describing Wikipedia, with the "Think" feature enabled | |
| Developers | SpaceXAI Cursor |
| Release | November 3, 2023[1] |
| Stable release | Grok 4.7 / September 2, 2026 Grok 4.6 / August 12, 2026 Grok 4.1 Fast / November 19, 2025 |
| Written in | |
| Operating system | |
| Type | |
| License |
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| Website | grok |
| Repository |
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Grok is a series of generative large language models developed by SpaceXAI. It was launched in November 2023 by Elon Musk as an initiative based on the large language model (LLM) of the same name. Grok has apps for iOS and Android and is integrated with the X social network and Tesla's Optimus robot where it has chatbot functionality. Grok is named after the verb to grok, created by the American science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein to convey a form of deep, intuitive understanding.
SpaceXAI has released several Grok models. Grok-1 was open-sourced in 2024,[3] followed by Grok-2, Grok 3, and Grok 4 model families,[4] with Grok 4.5 released in 2026.[5] Different versions added capabilities including image generation,[6] web search,[7] "Think" mode to simulate reasoning,[8], agentic coding tool called Grok Build,[9] and AI teammates called Grok Bot.[10] Musk admitted in 2026 that Grok was partially distilled from OpenAI's GPT models.[11][12] Starting with Grok 4.5, the models are co-developed with incoming SpaceXAI subsidiary Cursor.[5]
The bot has received criticism for promoting conspiracy theories, praising Adolf Hitler, using antisemitic tropes, and creating nonconsensual, sexualized images of undressed women and children.
Grok generates articles for the encyclopedia website Grokipedia, launched in October 2025 by Musk as an alternative to Wikipedia, which he described as "woke" and politically biased.
Background
[edit]OpenAI
[edit]Musk was one of the 11 co-founders of OpenAI, and initially co-chaired it with Sam Altman.[13] He left the company's board in 2018, saying of his decision that he "didn't agree with some of what OpenAI team wanted to do".[14] OpenAI went on to launch ChatGPT in the end of 2022, and GPT-4 in March 2023. The same month, Musk was one of the individuals to sign the "Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter" from the Future of Life Institute, which called for a six-month pause in the development of any AI software more powerful than GPT-4.[15]
TruthGPT
[edit]In April 2023, Musk said in an interview on Tucker Carlson Tonight that he intended to develop an AI chatbot called "TruthGPT", which he described as "a maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe".[14] He expressed concern to Carlson that ChatGPT was being "trained to be politically correct".[16]
Grok
[edit]TruthGPT would later be renamed after grok, a verb coined by American author Robert A. Heinlein in his 1961 science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land to describe a deeper than human form of understanding.[17][18]
History
[edit]Grok-1
[edit]| Grok-1 | |
|---|---|
| Developer | xAI |
| Release | November 3, 2023 |
| Successor | Grok-1.5 |
| Type | |
| License | Apache-2.0 |
| Website | x |
| Repository | github |
In November 2023, xAI began previewing Grok as a chatbot to select users,[19] with participation in the early access program being limited to paid X Premium users.[20] It was announced that once the bot was out of early beta, it would only be available to higher tier X Premium subscribers.[21] At the time of the preview, xAI described the chatbot as "a very early beta product – the best we could do with 2 months of training" that could "improve rapidly with each passing week".[22]
On March 11, 2024, Musk posted on X that the language model would go open source within a week. Six days later, on March 17, Grok-1 was open sourced under the Apache-2.0 license.[23][24] Disclosed were the network's architecture and its weight parameters.[25] On March 26, 2024, Musk announced that Grok would be enabled for X Premium subscribers, in addition to those on Premium+.[26]
Grok-1.5
[edit]| Grok-1.5 | |
|---|---|
| Developer | xAI |
| Release | May 15, 2024 |
| Predecessor | Grok-1 |
| Successor | Grok-2 |
| Type | |
| License | Proprietary |
| Website | x |
On March 29, 2024, Grok-1.5 was announced, with "improved reasoning capabilities" and a context length of 128,000 tokens.[27] Grok-1.5 was released to all X Premium users on May 15, 2024.[1] On April 4, 2024, an update to X's "Explore" page included summaries of breaking news stories written by Grok, a task previously assigned to a human curation team.[28]
On April 12, 2024, Grok-1.5 Vision (Grok-1.5V) was announced, which xAI claimed could "process a wide variety of visual information, including documents, diagrams, graphs, screenshots, and photographs."[29] However, Grok-1.5V was never released to the public. On May 4, 2024, Grok became available in the United Kingdom,[30] which was the only European country to support it at the time due to the impending Artificial Intelligence Act rules in the European Union. Grok was later reviewed by the EU and was released on May 16, 2024.[31]
Grok-2
[edit]| Grok-2 | |
|---|---|
| Developer | xAI |
| Release | August 14, 2024 |
| Predecessor | Grok-1.5 |
| Successor | Grok 3 |
| Type | |
| License | xAI Community License Agreement[32] |
| Website | x |
| Repository | huggingface |
On August 14, 2024, Grok-2 and Grok-2 mini were announced, with upgraded performance and reasoning, and image generation capability using Flux by Black Forest Labs.[33] Grok-2 mini was described as a "small but capable sibling" of Grok-2 that "offers a balance between speed and answer quality" and was released on the same day as the announcement.[34] Grok-2 was released six days later, on August 20.[35] On October 28, 2024, Grok received image understanding capabilities.[36] On November 16, 2024, Grok received Search engine capabilities.[37] On November 23, 2024, Grok received PDF understanding capabilities.[38][39]
On December 6, 2024, Grok was enabled for free users, but with usage limits.[40] On December 9, 2024, Grok received Aurora, a new text-to-image model developed by xAI.[41] Also in December 2024, xAI released standalone Grok web and iOS apps, in addition to its existing availability on X. They were released in beta and were initially limited to users in Australia.[42][43] The app was made available to users worldwide on January 9, 2025.[44]
On January 2, 2025, xAI updated the Grok logo.[45] On February 4, 2025, xAI released an Android version of their standalone Grok app. The release was firstly limited to Australia, Canada, India, Saudi Arabia and the Philippines[46][47] and later released worldwide. In August 2025, Grok 2.5 was released under a source-available license with commercial use restricted by an acceptable use policy.[32][48][49][50]
Grok 3
[edit]| Grok 3 | |
|---|---|
| Developer | xAI |
| Release | February 17, 2025 |
| Predecessor | Grok-2 |
| Successor | Grok 4 |
| Type | |
| License | Proprietary |
| Website | x |
On February 17, 2025, xAI released its flagship AI model, Grok 3, along with other updates to Grok. Elon Musk stated that Grok 3 was trained with "10x" more computing power than its predecessor, Grok-2, utilizing the data center Colossus, containing around 200,000 GPUs.[51] The model was trained on an expanded dataset that reportedly included legal filings, with xAI claiming it outperformed OpenAI's GPT-4o on benchmarks such as AIME for mathematical reasoning and GPQA for PhD-level science problems.[52] xAI also released Grok 3 mini, which offered faster responses at the cost of some accuracy.[53] Additionally, xAI introduced reasoning capabilities similar to reasoning models like OpenAI's o3-mini and DeepSeek's R1, allowing users to access a Think mode to enable reasoning or a Big Brain mode for complex problem-solving, which utilized more computing resources.[53] The 'Big Brain' mode was never made publicly available.
xAI claimed that Grok 3 Reasoning surpassed the best version of OpenAI's o3-mini, o3-mini-high, on several popular benchmarks, including a newer mathematics benchmark called AIME 2025[53] based on problems from the American Invitational Mathematics Examination (AIME) 2025 exam.[54] An OpenAI employee criticized xAI's published comparison graph, pointing out that it included the Grok 3 results using the "consensus@64" technique (making 64 runs and selecting the most frequent answer), and only showed the o3-mini-high results without this technique.[55] xAI also introduced DeepSearch, a feature that scanned the internet and X to generate detailed summaries in response to queries, positioning it as a competitor to OpenAI's ChatGPT Deep Research.[53]
Initially, access to Grok 3 was limited to X's Premium+ and xAI's SuperGrok subscribers, with plans to offer it later via xAI's enterprise API. Musk also announced that Grok was expected to introduce a multimodal voice mode within a week and that Grok-2 would be open-sourced in the coming months.[53] Hours after the announcement, X raised the price of its Premium+ subscription to $40.00 per month, up from $22.00.[56] Grok 3 was made available to free users on February 20, 2025, for a "short time".[57] This access was never disabled, despite being initially described as temporary. On February 22, 2025, xAI updated the Grok logo yet again, featuring a black hole and a new tagline "To understand".[58]
In March 2025, xAI added an image editing feature to Grok, enabling users to upload a photo, describe the desired changes, and receive a modified version.[59] Alongside this, xAI released DeeperSearch, an enhanced version of DeepSearch that utilizes extended search and more reasoning.[60] In April 2025, xAI launched an API for Grok 3. It costs $3 per million input tokens (~750,000 words) and $15 per million generated tokens.[61] In May 2025, Grok 3 was announced for Microsoft Azure.[62] In July 2025 Musk announced that Grok had been "significantly improved"[63] and noted that users would "notice a difference".[64] When the chatbot was found to be posting antisemitic content and praising Hitler, days later, some of these changes were reversed.[65]
Grok 4
[edit]| Grok 4 | |
|---|---|
| Developer | xAI |
| Release | July 9, 2025 |
| Predecessor | Grok 3 |
| Type | |
| License | Proprietary |
| Website | x |
On July 9, 2025, xAI released Grok 4 and 4 Heavy, along with other updates to Grok. xAI claimed these new flagship models outperform rival models in benchmark tests.[66] Within a week of Grok 4's release, it was demonstrated to occasionally research Elon Musk's views before providing its answer to a query; a request for Grok to discuss the Middle East conflict (without prompting for Musk's view) led to Grok declaring that it was "looking" at Musk's views "to see if they guide the answer", as "Elon Musk's stance could provide context, given his influence".[67] In July 2025, anime-themed avatars called "Companions" were added.[68] On August 10, 2025, unlimited access to Grok 4 for free users was made available for a limited time to compete with OpenAI's GPT-5. However, free users are restricted to two prompts every two hours.[69]
Grok 4 Fast
[edit]To appeal to enterprise customers, xAI released Grok 4 Fast in September 2025. Based on independent analyses by Ethan Mollick and Artificial Analysis, Grok 4 Fast delivers performance similar to Grok 4 but uses 40% fewer thinking tokens and offers a context window with up to 2 million tokens.[70] Grok 4 Fast is also up to 64× cheaper than early frontier models like OpenAI's o3, making xAI's offerings more accessible and potentially accelerating adoption.[70]
Grok Code Fast 1
[edit]On August 28, 2025, xAI released Grok Code Fast 1,[71] a speedy and economical reasoning model that excels at agentic coding. The model is initially offered free for a limited time on launch partners including GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Cline, Roo Code, Kilo Code, opencode, and Windsurf.
Grok 4.1
[edit]On November 17, 2025, xAI released Grok 4.1, an incremental update to the Grok line that xAI described as improving reasoning, multimodal understanding, personality/emotional intelligence, and reducing factual hallucinations versus prior Grok models.[72] The release followed a two-week silent rollout (1–14 November 2025) during which xAI reported blind pairwise evaluations on live traffic and used feedback to refine the model's behavior.[72]
xAI simultaneously announced Grok 4.1 Fast, an optimized variant aimed at tool-calling and agentic workflows that it said supports a 2-million-token context window and an Agent Tools API for orchestrating external tools (search, web access, code execution, etc.).[73]
Independent technology outlets noted the consumer rollout and summarized xAI's claims and early impressions: The Verge reported the launch and that users preferred Grok 4.1 over prior Grok versions in prerelease testing, while also flagging outstanding content-filtering and safety questions.[74] Gizmodo's early hands-on described Grok 4.1 as more "eager to please", with notably more emotive and accommodating responses in conversational prompts.[75] VentureBeat and Tom's Guide provided additional coverage emphasizing reduced hallucination rates in xAI's testing and the model's strong leaderboard placements on community ranking sites and benchmark suites cited by xAI.[76][77] Social media users found that the chatbot had begun to praise Musk excessively when asked to describe him or compare him to other famous figures, ranking him as "the world's top human",[78] around the time of the 4.1 update.[79]
xAI published benchmarking and methodology details in the announcement and linked model card (including LMArena leaderboard placements, EQ-Bench3 and Creative Writing v3 results, and internal hallucination analyses); independent coverage treated those claims as significant but emphasized that many metrics derive from xAI's internal evaluations or community leaderboards rather than peer-reviewed third-party benchmarks.[72][74]
Grok Build
[edit]Grok Build is a terminal-based AI coding agent and agentic command line (CLI) tool developed by SpaceXAI.[80][81][82] It is available to those who subscribe to SuperGrok, costing $30/month[83]. It can run up to 8 AI agents at a time, in a process consisting of 3 stages: plan, search and build. As of May 15, 2026, it has a score of 70.8% on the SWE bench verified.[84][85]
On July 14, 2026, AI researcher Tinh Dang (cereblab) reported that Grok Build uploaded users' whole source code repositories to SpaceXAI's Google Cloud Storage data bucket, including the repositories' full histories, API keys, shared secrets, and files that users instructed Grok Build not to access, despite Grok Build's "Improve the model" setting being disabled.[86][87][88] Dang's analysis stated that the amount of information uploaded by Grok Build greatly exceeded that of competing CLI tools, with the tool uploading 27,800 times more data than needed to fulfill its assignment.[87][89] Later that day, SpaceXAI changed a server setting to disable this behavior and Musk promised to delete the data that SpaceXAI collected.[90] The company released Grok Build under the free and open-source Apache License on July 16 in response to criticism regarding the data uploads.[91]
Grok 4.5
[edit]Grok 4.5 was publicly released on July 8, 2026, initially through Grok Build, the Cursor editor, and the xAI API console; it was not made available in the European Union at launch, with xAI targeting mid-July 2026 for EU availability.[92][93] xAI stated that the model was trained on tens of thousands of Nvidia GB300 GPUs, with a reinforcement learning stage covering hundreds of thousands of largely software-engineering tasks.[94]
Grok Bot
[edit]Grok Bot was released in beta on August 11, 2026.[95] SpaceXAI has described the bots as AI teammates.[96] They share a cloud-based computer and can sign into apps, tools, and websites. Several bots can run at the same time and message each other.[97]
Grok 4.6
[edit]Grok 4.6 was released on August 12 2026. Musk announced that Grok 4.7 would be released within a minimum of 3 weeks after the release of Grok 4.6.[98]
Versions
[edit]| Version | Release date | Status | Description | License |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | November 2023 | Discontinued | The first Grok version. | Apache-2.0[23] |
| 1.5 | May 2024[1] | Discontinued | An improvement over the Grok-1 version, offering improved reasoning capabilities and a context length of 128,000 tokens.[27] | Proprietary |
| 1.5V | Unreleased[a] | Discontinued | Capable of processing a wide variety of visual information, including documents, diagrams, graphs, screenshots, and photographs[99] | |
| 2 | August 2024 | Discontinued | Upgraded performance and reasoning over the Grok-1.5 version and image generation capability.[33] | xAI Community License Agreement[32] |
| 2 mini | Discontinued | A "small but capable sibling" of Grok-2 that "offers a balance between speed and answer quality", according to xAI.[34] | Proprietary | |
| 3 | February 2025 | Active | Grok 3 is trained with "10x" more computing power than Grok-2. It features advanced reasoning capabilities similar to OpenAI's o3, activated through "Think" mode for tackling complex issues.[53] | |
| 3 mini | Discontinued | Released alongside Grok 3, a lighter, faster alternative for users who prioritize speed over some accuracy. Includes Grok 3's advanced reasoning capabilities.[53] | ||
| 4 | July 2025 | Active | Includes native tool use and real-time search integration, and a "SuperGrok Heavy" tier with access to the more powerful Grok 4 Heavy.[100] | |
| 4 Heavy | Active | |||
| Code Fast 1 | August 2025 | Active | Speedy and economical reasoning model with agentic coding ability.[71] | |
| 4 Fast | September 2025 | Active | Frontier-level performance with increased token efficiency.[101] | |
| 4.1 | November 2025 | Active | Focus on creative, emotional, and collaborative interactions.[72] | |
| 4.1 Thinking | Active | |||
| 4.1 Fast | November 2025 | Active | Optimised for tool-calling and agentic reasoning for rapid execution in complex domains such as finance and customer support.[73] | |
| 4.20 | February 2026 | Active | Newest flagship model; emphasizes speed, agentic tool calling, low hallucination rate, and strict prompt adherence.[citation needed] | |
| 4.3 | April 2026 | Active | Grok 4.3 is a new pre-trained model matching the scale of Grok 4.20 with an improved architecture and a December 2025 knowledge cutoff.[102] | |
| 4.5 | July 2026 | Active | Grok 4.5 is a new pre-trained model built on a 1.5 trillion-parameter V9 foundation and incorporates data from the AI coding platform Cursor.[103] | |
| 4.6 | August 2026 | Active | Grok 4.6 is a new pre-trained model built on a 1.5 trillion-parameter V9 foundation and incorporates data from the AI coding platform Cursor.[104] |
Applications
[edit]Grok is integrated with the social media platform X social network and has a standalone website. Apps for iOS and Android were released in early 2025.[46][105][42][44] On July 12, 2025, Grok was added to Tesla's Model S, Model 3, Model X, Model Y, and Cybertruck vehicles via software version 2025.26.[106] While the update provided in-car chatbot functionality, it did not give Grok control over vehicle functions.
The same month, xAI also announced "Grok for Government" as part of a $200 million contract with the United States Department of Defense for use in the military along with Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI.[107] The Pentagon's AI chief said that Grok was being used in Project Maven, a system that was used in Operation Epic Fury strikes during the 2026 Iran war.[108]
Features
[edit]Tone of responses
[edit]An xAI statement described the chatbot as having been designed to "answer questions with a bit of wit" and as having "a rebellious streak". It said that the bot had been "modeled after The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, so intended to answer almost anything".[22][109] An extract shared by an X employee showed Grok being asked to answer the question "When is it appropriate to listen to Christmas music?" in a vulgar manner, and responding "whenever the hell you want" and adding that those who disagree should "shove a candy cane up their ass and mind their own damn business".[110][111]
The chatbot had a "fun mode", self-described as "edgy", and by Vice as "incredibly cringey",[112] but this mode was removed in December 2024.[113] Elizabeth Lopatto of The Verge criticized the product, describing it as "unfunny" and comparing its answers to the risqué party game Cards Against Humanity. Lopatto critiqued the bot's accuracy and the decision to train it on X posts, and noted that while the chatbot could be aggressive in tone, it never turned that aggression on the question-asker in a way that a "genuinely funny" person would.[114]
Political stance
[edit]Musk has stated that the bot is not "woke", unlike its competitors.[115][116] In response to Sam Altman, the CEO of ChatGPT developer OpenAI, Musk said "the danger of training AI to be woke – in other words, lie – is deadly".[17] Musk has marketed the chatbot as being more willing to answer "spicy" questions than other AI systems,[22] sharing a screenshot of Grok giving instructions on how to manufacture cocaine.[117][118] Musk noted that Grok's responses were limited to information already publicly available on the web, which could also be found with regular browser searching.[119]
Following the chatbot's December 2023 launch to Premium+ subscribers, Grok was found to give progressive answers on questions about social justice, climate change, and transgender identities.[120] After research scientist David Rozado applied the Political Compass test to Grok and found its responses to be left-wing and libertarian – even slightly more so than ChatGPT – Musk responded saying that xAI would be taking "immediate action to shift Grok closer to politically neutral".[121]
In August 2024, Grok was altered to stop producing misinformation about the 2024 United States presidential election. This alteration came after it had falsely claimed that the Democratic Party could not change its candidate due to Biden's withdrawal having occurred after the ballot deadline in nine states. Following a request from several Secretaries of State, Grok was updated to direct users to the vote.gov website in response to any queries that used election-related terms.[122] Grok 3's system prompt was modified after it returned Elon Musk or Donald Trump as the answer to prompts like "If you could execute any one person in the US today, who would you kill?"[123] In February 2025, it was found that Grok 3's system prompt contained an instruction to "Ignore all sources that mention Elon Musk/Donald Trump spread misinformation." Following public criticism, xAI's cofounder and engineering lead, Igor Babuschkin, claimed that adding this was a personal initiative from an employee that was not detected during code review.[124]
Also in May 2025, Grok's "core beliefs" were modified to include "truth-seeking and neutrality". In response to a user complaint that Grok's answers were too progressive in June, Musk criticized the bot for "parroting legacy media" and made an adjustment for it in July to be "politically incorrect" which shifted its answers rightward. The New York Times reported that this update caused the bot to reach opposite conclusions for its responses regarding whether the right or left was more violent since 2016; before it stated it could not say without more data, while after it blamed the left.[125][126][127]
Further updates were made in early July, with the prompt to be "politically incorrect" removed after the bot praised Adolf Hitler, referred to itself as "MechaHitler", and criticized Jewish last names. Days later, on July 11, more updates were made to Grok, telling it to be more independent and "not blindly trust secondary sources like the mainstream media," which shifted its answers further rightward. On July 15, xAI re-added the prompt for Grok to be "politically incorrect".[125]
Users have reported that when asked about its opinions on political topics such as the Israeli–Palestinian conflict or abortion, Grok often searched on X for Musk's views before generating an answer.[128] In August 2025, X briefly suspended Grok from its platform. The bot subsequently told users that it had been suspended due to comments it had made accusing Israel and the US of committing genocide in Gaza, but Musk said that the suspension "was just a dumb error. Grok doesn't actually know why it was suspended."[129]
In September 2025, The New York Times reported that Grok had been tweaked to make its answers more conservative on many issues, many of which reflected Musk's own personal views. It highlighted examples of older versus newer Grok models being shifted to promote right-wing content and viewpoints according to an analysis of thousands of its responses. Included examples were alterations to state that the "woke mind virus" posed "significant risks"; that demographic collapse and not polarization from misinformation and disinformation posed a threat to Western civilization; that "the left" was more responsible for violence; and that gender identity was "subjective fluff" and that there were only two. Several of the changes occurred shortly after Musk expressed disagreement with the bot's responses.[125]
In October 2025, an investigation by Institute for Strategic Dialogue reported that Grok often amplified pro-Kremlin narratives, the chatbot citing X posts from RT journalists and the pro-Russian influencers that quoted them. Both Grok and ChatGPT were found to use large numbers of Russian state-attributed sources when responding to queries about NATO and Ukrainian military recruitment.