Another one of Elon Musk’s subsidiary companies’ xAI announced the addition of image understanding capabilities to Grok’s AI model.
Earlier today, Musk himself posted on X, “Grok now understands images, even explaining the meaning of a joke.”
The new image understanding capability is still an early version. Musk says it will be improved rapidly.
Essentially, the Grok AI model now allows users to upload an image and inquire about the image to its AI chatbot.
This new addition paves the way for a more interactive user experience using an AI chatbot.
However, access to the Grok AI chatbot with image-understanding capabilities is limited to X platform’s paid users for now.
Previously Twitter, now X paid account users will be able to inquire about the images they upload starting today.
In his X post, Musk posted an example of how Grok’s image capability functions.
Grok now understands images, even explaining the meaning of a joke.
This is an early version. It will rapidly improve.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 28, 2024
What is Grok?
Grok is a conversational AI chatbot for X social media platform users developed by Musk-owned xAI. Akin to ChatGPT, Grok engages in conversations with its users. What sets it apart from other conversational AI chatbots is its ability to access information in real time via X.
xAI says Grok is an AI modelled after the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, so intended to answer almost anything and, far harder, even suggest what questions to ask!
The AI model is programmed to answer user questions not entirely robotically but with “a bit of wit” and “has a rebellious streak.”
“It will also answer spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems,” xAI added.
Grok answers with a lot of humour thrown in. It can be accessed only by premium users on X.
Musk’s AI time created Grok to serve users with an AI tool that also helps people of all backgrounds and political views. Often political questions are rejected by AI platforms to avoid seeming biased or discriminatory against people of diverse backgrounds.
Grok Update
Earlier in August, xAI also announced the roll-out of the Grok-2 Beta Release. This is the AI form’s primary language model equipped with reasoning capabilities.
As part of the Grok series, Musk’s company also introduced the Grok-2 and Grok-2 mini. These two models were released to Grok users on the X platform. The Grok-2 family models were also made available to xAI’s enterprise API as well.
xAI announced that Grok-2 is a significant step forward from their previous model – Grok-1.5, featuring frontier capabilities in chat, coding, and reasoning.
“At the same time, we are introducing Grok-2 mini, a small but capable sibling of Grok-2,” xAI added.
“An early version of Grok-2 has been tested on the LMSYS leaderboard under the name "sus-column-r”.”
The firm said that the new Grok models seem to have outperformed both Claude 3.5 Sonnet and GPT-4-Turbo at the time of the launch in August.
The latest addition to Grok’s AI chatbot is part of xAI’s initiatives to introduce more features for both the chatbot and paid users of the X platform.
TechCrunch reported that X introduced a new tool called Radar for Premium+ subscribers earlier this month. This addition allowed X users to observe real-time trends and provide insights into conversations.
