Musk's xAI releases upgraded Grok 1.5 AI chatbot

xAI startup announced Thursday it will be releasing an upgraded version of its AI chatbot Grok – barely two weeks after Elon Musk declared that Grok would become an open-source model.

The latest iteration Grok-1.5 will be given “improved reasoning capabilities and a context length of 128,000 tokens,” xAI stated in a company blog post.

The large language model (LLM) will be available to testers and existing Grok users on X in the coming days, it said.

On Tuesday, Musk had announced that Grok would become available for all X premium subscription users – up until now, only X premium+ users were granted access to Grok, which happened back in December.

Musk added to that news Thursday, posting on his social messaging platform that “Going forward, all X accounts with over 2500 verified subscriber followers will get Premium features for free,” and increasing the number of Grok users by the tens of thousands.

xAI said one of the most notable improvements for the upgraded version is its performance in coding and math-related tasks.

Grok will also be better at understanding long and more complex contexts due to its “increased memory capacity of up to 16 times the previous context length,” xAI said.

The company said it will be announcing even more Grok features over the next week.

The move to make Grok open source came just days after Musk had filed suit against OpenAI, accusing the company and its CEO, Sam Altman, of ditching its original nonprofit mission in favor of a for-profit model.

Now available on GitHub, others can freely experiment with what xAI said is the “raw” base version of the pre-trained Grok large language model.

Grok, the AI chatbot for "understanding the universe,” was released by xAI in November 2023 as a competitor of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Musk, the current CEO of xAI, co-founded the AI startup with former Google Deep Mind AI researcher Igor Babuschkin eight months earlier.