Grok is an AI assistant and chatbot developed by xAI, an artificial intelligence (AI) company founded by Elon Musk in 2023.
Grok is able to generate text and images and engage in conversations with users, similar to ChatGPT and other tools. Unlike other chatbots, though, it can access information in real-time through the web and X (formerly Twitter), and is programmed to respond to edgy and provocative questions with witty and “rebellious” answers.
What Is Grok?
Grok is a conversational AI assistant developed by Elon Musk’s company xAI. Grok can access real-time information through the web and the social media platform X, and is said to answer “spicy” questions typically rejected by most other AI systems.
It can be used for free on X, Grok.com and the Grok app, with higher usage limits available for X Premium, X Premium+, SuperGrok and SuperGrok Heavy users.
Grok is essentially Musk’s answer to ChatGPT, whose maker (OpenAI) he co-founded in 2015 but left in 2018 after a reported power struggle with now-CEO Sam Altman. Musk has since condemned ChatGPT for being too left-leaning and dangerous. According to Musk, xAI is intended to be a direct competitor to OpenAI, with its Grok chatbot not only serving as ChatGPT’s “anti-woke” counterpart, but also showcasing new possibilities in the larger generative AI space.
What Is Grok?
Grok is an AI assistant and chatbot developed by xAI. Released in November of 2023, it is available for free to all X users, as well as on Grok.com and the Grok mobile app. It is also available with higher usage limits and access to advanced capabilities for X Premium and X Premium+ users on X, as well as for SuperGrok users on Grok.com and the Grok app.
The large language model that powers Grok was trained on xAI’s Colossus supercomputer and refined using reinforcement learning. Like all LLMs, this model and its predecessors were trained on massive amounts of text data scraped from the internet, which includes everything from Wikipedia articles to scientific papers. But what makes Grok different is its direct access to posts made on X. This enables Grok to have “real-time knowledge of the world,” according to the company, which gives it a “massive advantage over other models,” as Musk put it.
Why Is It Called Grok?
Grok’s name is believed to have originated from Robert A. Heinlein’s 1961 science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land, in which the story’s main character, a Martian, uses the term “grok” to convey a profound and intuitive understanding of something.
While Musk has never officially confirmed the meaning of Grok’s name, he posted “Stranger in a Strange Land” on X the day after the chatbot was announced, likely referencing Heinlein’s book. By adopting this word, xAI appears to envision Grok as more than just another chatbot, but a tool to “assist humanity in its quest for understanding and knowledge,” according to its website.
Grok’s sense of humor and “personality” was modeled after another novel: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, one of Musk’s favorite books.
“It’s a book on philosophy, disguised as a book on humor,” Musk said in an interview with computer scientist and podcaster Lex Fridman. With Grok, xAI is working to maintain that ethos while also adhering to “the truth of the universe,” Musk explained, and eventually discovering new truths — approaching something closer to artificial general intelligence, where a machine can learn and think like (or even better than) a human.
What Can Grok Do?
Grok can engage in chats, generate images, draft emails, debug code, brainstorm ideas and more — and all in fluent, human-like language. It simply receives an input (like a command, question or image), applies knowledge from its training data, and uses sophisticated neural networks to generate a relevant text or image output.
While it is used in the same ways as other AI chatbots, “Grok will probably say ‘yes’ to a lot more jobs that you give it,” said Sharon Gai, an author and speaker who focuses on the AI industry.
Indeed, xAI says Grok is willing to answer questions that most other chatbots would refuse, no matter how taboo or potentially harmful they may be. For example, Musk shared a screenshot of Grok offering a step-by-step guide to making cocaine for “educational purposes,” which included instructions like “start cooking and hope you don’t blow yourself up or get arrested.” He shared another screenshot of Grok offering advice for what to do if you get an STD in increasingly “vulgar” ways.
Grok also offers Grok Vision, multilingual audio and real-time search in its Voice Mode on the Grok iOS and Android mobile apps. With Grok Vision, users can point their device camera at real-world text, objects or environments and ask Grok to analyze what’s in view to provide immediate context and information.
Grok vs. ChatGPT: How Are They Different?
While both Grok and ChatGPT share the goal of facilitating human-like interactions through artificial intelligence, they approach it in fairly different ways, offering their own unique strengths and weaknesses. Here are a few:
Grok vs. ChatGPT
- Grok can be less politically correct than ChatGPT.
- Grok scores better than ChatGPT on some benchmark exams.
- Grok has an open-source model version; ChatGPT does not.
1. Grok Can Be Less Politically Correct Than ChatGPT
In Musk’s words, Grok is “maximum truth-seeking” and “based,” meaning it is unapologetic and communicates without regard for political correctness.
“[Musk] believes that free speech should be allowed to every and any degree,” Gai said. “That is what Grok is modeled after as well.”
xAI’s creation of a less politically correct chatbot comes at a time when most other big AI companies are working to make their own chatbots even more politically correct. OpenAI emphasizes the safety of the models that powers ChatGPT, claiming they are trained to refuse generating “sexual,” “violent” and “extremist” content. And Anthropic’s Claude chatbot was trained using constitutional AI, which helps to reduce the likelihood of it generating toxic, dangerous or unethical responses.
Because ChatGPT and Grok approach truth and safety in such different ways, “they have entirely different purposes,” Lance Whitney, freelance tech journalist who has covered Grok and other AI chatbots extensively, told Built In. Grok is explicitly designed to answer questions in a non-PC way, so “it’s not necessarily a chatbot I would go to for research,” he continued. “I would sooner go to ChatGPT.”
At the same time, though, ChatGPT is much more limited in the subjects it is willing to discuss with users, so it’s not always as useful as Grok. For example, Gai said she tried to use ChatGPT to help summarize a text involving suicide, and it outright refused to do the job. “It’s not like I was investigating into suicide for myself or anybody else, it was just refusing to even touch that job,” she said. “But that is something Grok would not refuse.”
Grok could also be useful in understanding the “zeitgeist,” Whitney said, because it has direct access to social media posts. “If I wanted to get a sense of what people are thinking about a certain topic, what they’re discussing and how they feel about it, I would go to Grok.”
However, shortly after Grok’s release, a Vice investigation found that it tends to spout inaccuracies about current events and lend credence to unproven conspiracy theories — due largely to X’s propensity for disinformation and even hate speech since Musk’s purchase of the site in 2022.
3. Grok Has an Open-Source Model Version, ChatGPT Does Not
Every few years, xAI releases the network architecture and base weights of some of it models — particularly when a new, closed one is launched. Tallows other developers to use and build on the model, including for commercial purposes. OpenAI does not do this.
How to Use Grok
Here’s how to access and use Grok:
How to Use Grok on X
- Sign up for an account on X.
- On the X home screen, click the ‘Grok’ tab on desktop, or the Grok icon at the bottom of the screen on mobile.
- Use the chatbox to submit requests and start conversations with Grok. Most models are free to all X users, but with limited usage limits.
- For increased Grok usage limits on X, sign up for an X Premium plan (offers higher usage limits, and includes SuperGrok subscription) or an X Premium+ plan (offers highest usage limits, and includes SuperGrok subscription).
How to Use Grok on Grok.com
- Visit grok.com and use the chatbox to start using for free, but with limited usage limits.
- For increased Grok usage limits on Grok.com, sign up for a Grok account and purchase the SuperGrok or SuperGrok Heavy plan. A singular SuperGrok plan is usable on both grok.com and the Grok mobile app.
How to Use Grok on the Grok App
- Download the Grok mobile app in the App Store for Apple devices or the Google Play store for Android devices.
- Open the app and use for free, with limited usage limits.
- For increased Grok usage limits on the Grok app, sign up for a Grok account and purchase the SuperGrok or SuperGrok Heavy plan. A singular SuperGrok plan is usable on both grok.com and the Grok mobile app.
Notable Grok Updates
Since its debut in 2023, Grok has undergone multiple iterations as xAI seeks to rival leading models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google.
The timeline below outlines Grok’s key developments and the model’s broader implications for the generative AI ecosystem:
Half of xAI’s Co-Founders Have Left the Company (February 2026)
Two xAI co-founders announced their departure from the company in February, marking a total of six of the original 12 co-founders who are no longer with the company, with a majority of the exits occurring within the last year. The latest founders to leave, Yuhuai (Tony) Wu and Jimmy Ba, departed within weeks of the company’s deepfake nudes scandal, which resulted in the creation and distribution of millions of sexualized images of men, women and children. Their departures also followed Musk’s announcement of his intention to merge xAI with SpaceX and seek an IPO. Soon after Wu and Ba announced their departures, Musk unveiled a new organizational structure for xAI during a company all-hands meeting.
X Blocks Grok From Generating Explicit Images (January 2026)
Following investigations (and some bans) across multiple countries, X will restrict users in certain locations from generating sexualized images of real people with Grok. This move comes after X initially limited this kind of image generation to paying subscribers, which received a lot of public backlash.
Grok Generates Sexualized Images (January 2026)
In late December 2025, users on X successfully prompted Grok to generate and post of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) directly into public replies. The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) later confirmed the AI-generated images depicted girls as young as 11 to 13 years old. Shortly after, Grok issued a statement characterizing the incidents as a failure of its safety guardrails and restricted image-generation requests to paying premium subscribers.
This series of events triggered a wave of global investigations, with authorities in the United Kingdom, European Union, India, France and Ireland launching inquiries into whether X’s AI deployment violates national digital safety laws and child protection mandates. Meanwhile Malaysia and Indonesia became the first countries to block the Grok chatbot.
Grok 4.1 Release (November 2025)
Grok 4.1 released with improvements in Grok’s real-world usability in comparison to previous Grok models. It is especially capable in creative, emotional and collaborative interactions, exhibiting greater perception of nuance and a more coherent “personality” while still maintaining Grok’s core intelligence. In particular, Grok 4.1 demonstrated a new standard in blind human preference evaluations, achieving a higher ranking than other models on benchmarks like the LMArena Text Leaderboard and EQ-Bench for emotional intelligence.
Grokipedia Release (October 2025)
xAI launched Grokipedia, an AI-generated online encyclopedia designed as an alternative to Wikipedia, which Elon Musk claims has a liberal bias. Grokipedia’s content is entirely produced and “fact-checked” by xAI’s chatbot, Grok, with users only able to propose revisions for Grok to evaluate, not directly edit the pages. Following its beta launch, Grokipedia has faced criticism for poor sourcing and factual inaccuracies in its information.
U.S. GSA and xAI Partner for Federal AI Adoption (September 2025)
The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) and xAI announced a OneGov contract that offers U.S. federal agencies access to xAI’s Grok 4 and Grok 4 Fast models for a cost of $0.42 per agency organization until March 2027. The agreement aims to speed up the adoption of AI across the U.S. federal government, and includes dedicated engineers and training to help agencies integrate the new Grok AI tools.
Grok 2 Goes Open Weight (August 2025)
On August 23, Elon Musk announced on X that the “@xAI Grok 2.5 model...is now open source” and available on Hugging Face. Though Musk mentions the model is “open source,” it’s clear from the repository that he meant “open weight,” which simply means that while users cannot access Grok 2’s underlying architecture and training code, they can download, study and fine-tune the numerical parameters that guide how Grok 2 makes decisions.
Grok Partners With U.S. Department of Defense (July 2025)
xAI secured a $200 million contract with the U.S. Department of Defense. The deal will allow the DoD to use Grok, which the company claims can help make government services faster and more efficient. This agreement follows a broader push by the department to integrate artificial intelligence into its operations, with similar contracts awarded to Anthropic, Google and OpenAI as well.
Grok 4 Release (July 2025)
xAI released Grok 4 with major improvements in reasoning, context retention and multimodal capabilities. The model performed competitively against Gemini 2.5 Pro and OpenAI’s o3 across several benchmarks — including GPQA, HMMT and ARC-AGI-2 — marking a “leap in frontier intelligence.” The model also supports a voice mode with real-time conversational speech, and the ability to use a device’s camera to perceive and analyze physical surroundings in real time.
Grok 3 Release (February 2025)
xAI launched Grok 3, a major architectural overhaul trained on the company’s Colossus supercomputer. The Grok 3 model offered faster response times and better contextual coherence, according to internal tests. At its release, xAI claimed Grok 3 overtook Gemini 2, GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet and DeepSeek V3 in math, science and coding benchmarks.
Grok 2 Release (August 2024)
xAI released Grok-2 with major improvements in reasoning, coding and math capabilities. According to xAI, the model at its beta release outperformed GPT-4 Turbo and Claude 3.5 Sonnet on benchmarks like MMLU and HumanEval. Grok 2 also marked a transition to a new custom training stack, and was made available to Premium users on X. The update reflected xAI’s move toward more competitive, performance-driven model development.
Grok 1.5 Release (March 2024)
In 2024, xAI released Grok 1.5 with support for longer context windows as well as improved coding and mathematical reasoning. Grok 1.5 was built on a custom distributed training framework based on JAX, Rust and Kubernetes. The Grok 1.5 model also integrated more tightly with X, highlighting xAI’s strategy of fusing product development with its social media infrastructure.
Grok 1 Release (November 2023)
Grok 1, the first version of Grok, was introduced as an AI modeled after The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Galaxy intended to “answer almost anything.” Grok 1 was distinguished by its edgy tone and real-time access to X platform data. Although its performance lagged behind established models, Grok 1 quickly drew attention due to Musk’s brand power and the model’s unfiltered style.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Grok?
Grok is a conversational AI assistant and chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI. Grok can access real-time knowledge through the web and the X social media platform, and is willing to answer “spicy” questions typically rejected by most other AI systems, according to xAI.
Why is it called Grok?
While Elon Musk has not confirmed the meaning of Grok’s name, it is believed to be a reference to the 1961 science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein, where the term “grok” is believed to have originated. The book’s main character, a Martian, uses the word as a verb to convey a profound and intuitive understanding of something.
Is Grok available?
Yes, Grok is available for free on X, Grok.com and the Grok mobile app, with higher usage limits available for X Premium, X Premium+, SuperGrok and SuperGrok Heavy users.
Is Grok open source?
Yes, xAI has fully open-sourced the base files and weights for Grok 1. It has also released the open weights for Grok 2. However, xAI’s newer flagship models are kept closed.
