Elon Musk's AI Company Launches Grok Image Generator: How It Works

Elon Musk-owned artificial intelligence (AI) firm, xAI, has updated its AI chatbot with image generation capabilities. The company rolled out access for Grok's image generation capabilities to some X (formerly known as Twitter) users. Soon after, the company rolled back the update without offering any explanation. Now, just three days later, xAI has officially launched Grok with image generation capabilities.

According to the details shared by xAI, Grok's image generation abilities are powered by a new AI model codenamed Aurora, which the company says is an 'auto-regressive mixture-of-experts network trained to predict the next token from interleaved text and image data'.

Furthermore, xAI says that the new and updated Grok excels at 'photorealistic rendering and precisely following text instructions'.

What is Grok and how does it work?

For the unversed, xAI had first announced Grok back in November 2023. At the time, the company had designed Grok to answer users' queries based on information already available and real-time updates on X, and it was based on Grok-1 large language model or LLM.

"At xAI, we want to create AI tools that assist humanity in its quest for understanding and knowledge," xAI had said at the time of launch.

Additionally, the AI chatbot was available to a limited set of users in the US only.

Now, almost a year later, Elon Musk-owned company has released Grok chatbot, powered by Grok 2 to all users globally.

What all can Grok AI do?

xAI's Grok can generate images using text-based prompts. It can also edit images based on the inputs from users. However, this feature will be available to users on X soon.

Beyond this, Grok can help users write notes, collate information from across the internet and even make recommendations.

How can X users access Grok?

xAI says that at the moment, Grok is available for free to X users on the web and in the Android and iOS-based apps. It can also be accessed from its own platform. But there's a catch.

xAI, in its blog post, said that Grok's new capabilities are now available on its platform in select countries and that these capabilities will roll out to all users within a week. We, at Republic Tech, were able to access all of Grok's features, including image-generation capabilities, on the web and in the X app.