Elon Musk's xAI chatbot 'Grok' debuts in India; check price plan for web, mobile app

Days after its global unveiling, Elon Musk-led startup xAI has launched its AI chatbot 'Grok' in India. Grok has also been launched in 45 other countries including Australia, New Zealand, Pakistan and Sri Lanka amongst others.

"Grok is now gracing the world in even more countries, spreading knowledge and laughter far and wide. The future is looking brighter already!," X CEO Linda Yaccarino says in a statement.

Grok, available on the web, iOS and Android, can be downloaded for the premium+ X subscribers in the US at a monthly payment of $16. In India, premium users will have to pay ₹1,300 per month on the web and ₹2,150 per month on mobile app to avail Grok.

Touted to be a rival of Open AI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, Grok has access to all user posts on X (formerly known as Twitter), a platform that Musk bought in October 2022 after much controversy.

 According to the company, Grok has been conceptualised after the book Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. With a training of only two months, Grok has been trained on the next token prediction. The company warns users that the generative AI model can generate false or contradictory information.

The company, however, expects the model to improve over the next few months.

"We give Grok access to search tools and real-time information, but as with all the LLMs trained on next-token prediction, our model can still generate false or contradictory information. We believe that achieving reliable reasoning is the most important research direction to address the limitations of current systems," xAI says.

The company claims that apart from providing answers in "wit and rebellious streak", the AI model has real-time knowledge of the entire model and can answer "spicy" questions that are rejected by most other AI systems.

Musk says that the aim behind creating Grok is to ensure that AI tools provide maximum benefit to humanity by helping users to access relevant information quickly, process data and come up with new ideas.

An AI model powers Grok called Grok-1, which the company developed earlier this year and has gone through several iterations.

"In the last two months, we have made significant improvements in reasoning and coding capabilities leading up to Grok-1, a state-of-the-art language model that is significantly more powerful, achieving 63.2% on the HumanEval coding task and 73% on MMLU," says the social media platform.

The development comes a week after xAI reportedly filed with the US Securities regulator to raise up to $1 billion in equity offering. Musk launched xAI in July this year to focus on research related to generative AI.

Over the past months, several big tech organisations such as Microsoft and Google have made multi-billion dollar investments on generative AI models. In February this year, Google launched Bard, a new experimental conversational GoogleAI service, which is powered by LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications). Meanwhile, in January this year, Microsoft made a multibillion-dollar investment in ChatGPT owner OpenAI as it looks to commercialise the advanced AI tech across its consumer and enterprise products. Microsoft in 2019 and 2021 had infused more than $1 billion in the company.

According to a study by McKinsey Research, generative AI applications could add $2.6 billion to $4.4 billion annually across the 63 use cases to the global economy.

 As per the study, as compared to earlier forms of AI and analytics, such as machine learning and deep learning, generative AI could increase productivity by up to 40%. McKinsey estimates that approximately 75% of the value that generative AI use cases could deliver comes from customer operations, marketing and sales, software engineering, and R&D.