Elon Musk's xAI has announced the release of the Grok-2 Beta giving Premium and Premium+ users on X access to Grok-2 mini and Grok-2. Musk said that the company was aiming to get Grok-2 out by August so that plan has kind of been stuck to, despite this just being a beta release.
Given the fact that Musk seems to disdain non-paying X users, Grok isn't available to them. This probably makes Grok less used than other language models and in terms of benchmark performance, free X users aren't really missing out.
While Grok-2 mini and Grok-2 are miles better than Grok-1.5, they are comparable to GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet; both of these are accessible to non-paying customers too.
Accompanying the new models is a new interface and new features. X has also partnered with Black Forest Labs to use their FLUX.1 model and expand Grok's abilities on X.
Briefly explaining the difference between the two new models, X says:
Grok-2 mini is our small but capable model that offers a balance between speed and answer quality. Compared to its predecessor, Grok-2 is more intuitive, steerable, and versatile across a wide range of tasks, whether you're seeking answers, collaborating on writing, or solving coding tasks.
Aside from using Grok on X, a new Enterprise API is due out later this month. This means that third-party developers can use the models in their products and services and this acts as another revenue stream for X.
What is a bit hypocritical about X's stance on making everyone pay to use Grok is that it allegedly used user data illegally to train its models. Earlier this week, the privacy group NOYB hit X with nine GDPR complaints for using EU users' data without their consent, something not allowed under GDPR privacy rules.
If NOYB is successful with its actions against X, Musk may have to put the breaks on Grok-3 and start the training all over again without EU user data. That could be a big setback for the firm in the AI race.
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