Elon Musk’s company, xAI, has released the next major update to its AI assistant, Grok. Grok-2 is a significant update over Grok 1.5 and features enhanced chat, coding, reasoning, and image generation capabilities. It is now available to X premium users.
Highlights
- Grok-2 launched with enhanced chat, coding, reasoning, and image generation.
- Grok-2’s image generation sans safeguards sparks concerns over potential misuse.
- Grok-2 and Grok-2 mini are accessible to X Premium users.
- Grok-3 is in the works
Grok-2: Key Features
Grok-2 comes with advanced conversational abilities for both professional and casual communications. It is also believed to boast great coding proficiency, problem-solving and analytical skills for complex tasks.
What works greatly in its favor is the real-time integration with data from the X social media platform, which will help it give up-to-date information.
Another big, or should we say ‘small’, update was Grok-2 mini, which is a streamlined version of Grok-2 with faster response times while maintaining accuracy.
On the LMSYS leaderboard, internal testing showed Grok-2 outperforming Claude 2.5 Sonnet and GPT-4 Turbo in coding and mathematics.
Grok-2: Controversial Image Generation Capability
Grok 2’s image generation capability could be a double-edged sword, due to its apparent lack of restrictions. This has for obvious reasons sparked controversy because, unlike DALL-E, Gemini, and Midjourney which are full of safeguards, Grok 2 can generate images of political figures and copyrighted characters.
Users have created potentially sensitive content involving former President Donald Trump or fictional scenarios involving current political leaders. This can lead to misuse, copyright infringement, and the spread of misinformation.
Grok 2: Availability and Future Prospects
Grok 2 and Grok 2 mini are currently available to X Premium and Premium+ subscribers, and will be available later this month to developers.
Elon Musk’s xAI plans to release Grok-3 by the end of the year, which is expected to be trained on 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs. This could potentially position it surpass OpenAI’s GPT-5. Grok-2 however still faces challenges in matching the overall capabilities of GPT-4.
GROK 2: Is there a Free version?
No, Grok 2 doesn’t have a free version and is exclusively available to subscribers of the Premium+ plan on X (formerly Twitter). xAI hasn’t announced any plans for a free version of Grok 2 either.
However, in March 2024, xAI did release the network architecture and base model weights of the original Grok-1 under an open-source Apache 2.0 license. This allows developers to use and build upon the model commercially, but users will likely need to fine-tune the model themselves before deployment.
Grok-2: How does it compare to other AI models?
Grok-2 has demonstrated its competitive capabilities in reasoning, math, and multimodal tasks, compared to other AI models. It outperforms GPT-4 on the MMLU-Pro and GPQA benchmarks, demonstrating strong capabilities in advanced reasoning tasks. However, GPT-4 and Claude 3.5 Sonnet still maintain an edge in areas like math and coding tasks.
Grok-2 mini offers faster response times and lower inference costs, making it suitable for applications where speed is crucial.
Grok-2: Ethical concerns and the future
Grok-2’s launch is a significant milestone for xAI. While the model’s advanced features and capabilities have generated excitement, the controversial image generation feature has raised concerns about potential misuse and ethical implications.
Its capability of integrating real-time data from the X platform also raises the question of its output being influenced by data generated by bad actors on X. For example, if bots or malicious groups spread misinformation on X, it could lead to controversial outputs.
xAI needs to address these concerns as it moves towards Grok-3 and beyond, as it could come into conflict with the laws of the land.
Feature Image Source: Mariia Shalabaieva
