Grok: What We Know About Elon Musk’s AI Chatbot

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.

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. 

Grok 3, the large language model that powers Grok, was trained on xAI’s Colossus supercomputer, a cluster of 200,000 NVIDIA Hopper graphics processing units (GPUs). Refined using reinforcement learning, Grok 3 displays “significant improvements in reasoning, mathematics, coding” and other instruction-following tasks. The Grok 3 model has leading performance in some academic benchmarks in comparison to DeepSeek, Gemini and GPT 4o models, with an early version of Grok 3 achieving an Elo score of 1402 in LMArena’s Chatbot Arena leaderboard.

Like all LLMs, Grok 3 and its preceding models 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.

The release of Grok 3 also rolled out DeepSearch and Think features. DeepSearch is an AI agent created by xAI to clearly summarize key information and reason about conflicting opinions or facts. It aims to take Grok users “far beyond a browser search,” providing a comprehensive report of information and context when Grok is asked a question. As for Grok’s Think button, it lets users view the reasoning process of the model and how it got to its final answer. DeepSearch and Think are available by default in Grok, with DeepSearch having two options: the standard DeepSearch (which offers “advanced search and reasoning”) or DeeperSearch (which offers “extended search, more reasoning”).

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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 have 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 mobile app. 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.

Starting in May 2025, an early beta release of Grok 3.5 will also be available to SuperGrok subscribers. Musk claimed Grok 3.5 will be “the first AI that can accurately answer technical questions about rocket engines or electrochemistry,” and noted that Grok is producing answers that “simply don’t exist on the internet.”

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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:

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 GPT-4o, which powers ChatGPT’s paid version, claiming it is trained to refuse generating “disallowed content,” which includes material that is “sexual,” “violent” and “extremist.” 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. 

2. Grok Scores Better Than ChatGPT on Some Benchmark Exams

Grok 3 Beta scored better than OpenAI’s GPT 4o, o1 and o3-mini models (available in ChatGPT) on AIME25’ and AIME24’ benchmarks in competitive math, the Graduate-Level Google-Proof Q&A (GPQA) benchmark and the LiveCodeBench (LCB) code generation benchmark, among others. 

3. Grok Has an Open Source Version, ChatGPT Does Not

In March 2024, xAI released the network architecture and base model weights of its large language model Grok-1 under the Apache 2.0 open-source license, which allows other developers to use and build on the model — including for commercial purposes. The open-source version is from the pre-training stage of development, meaning users will likely have to fine-tune the model on their own before putting it to work.

How to Use Grok

Here’s how to access and use Grok:

How to Use Grok on X

1. Sign up for an account on X.
2. On the X home screen, click the ‘Grok’ tab on desktop, or the Grok icon at the bottom of the screen on mobile.
3. Use the chatbox function to submit requests and start conversations with Grok. Grok also provides basic prompts for inspiration. Grok 3 is free to all X users, but with limited usage limits.
4. For increased Grok usage limits on X, sign up for an X Premium plan (offers higher usage limits) or an X Premium+ plan (offers highest usage limits, with access to DeepSearch and Think as well as early access to new Grok features) 

How to Use Grok on Grok.com

1. Visit grok.com and use the chatbox to start using Grok for free, with limited usage limits.
2. For increased Grok usage limits on Grok.com, sign up for a Grok account and purchase the SuperGrok plan. SuperGrok offers increased Grok 3 rate limits, and access to Grok 3 DeepSearch, Think and unlimited image generation. A singular SuperGrok plan is usable on both grok.com and the Grok mobile app.

How to Use Grok on the Grok App

1. Download the Grok mobile app in the App Store for Apple devices or the Google Play store for Android devices.
2. Open the app and use Grok for free, with limited usage limits.
3. For increased Grok usage limits on the Grok app, sign up for a Grok account and purchase the SuperGrok plan. SuperGrok offers increased Grok 3 rate limits, and access to Grok 3 DeepSearch, Think and unlimited image generation. A singular SuperGrok plan is usable on both grok.com and the Grok mobile app.

Frequently Asked Questions