According to a recent report, Elon Musk’s xAI is readying a standalone app, set to be launched as early as next month in the highly competitive artificial intelligence turf. Although it may be a relative latecomer to the field of AI, xAI has made several impressive steps of late, including implementing the ability to call functions in its LLMs, releasing an API for developers, and testing a free version of its AI model.
According to the report by The Wall Street Journal, Musk wants to position Grok AI as a separate product and release a chatbot app similar to ChatGPT. So far, Grok AI has only been accessible to users of X (formerly Twitter) and for subscribers to X Premium and Premium+. The eventuality of a standalone app would thus fall in line with the strategy adopted by xAI regarding its AI model: xAI provides a free-of-cost model.
Development of the app, together with an API for developers, indicates Musk’s ambition to build new revenue streams via AI offerings. To lure in developers, xAI has promised rewards in the form of free tokens in an attempt to make Grok accessible to the mass market and let other software and applications implement its functionality.
It points out that the broader ambition from Musk would be competing directly with OpenAI and making Grok a reasonable competitor in the AI arena. Grok still has yet to provide some of the functionality competitors, like native image generation, voice support, or high-level AI capabilities that major competitors offer, including Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Microsoft.
Musk’s rivalry with OpenAI has been ongoing, highlighted by a lawsuit filed earlier this year over alleged violations of a contract that stipulated OpenAI remain nonprofit. In response, OpenAI dismissed the allegations as “baseless and overreaching.”
Despite these challenges, Grok has added new features such as the ability to process and answer queries about images, making it more functional. What sets xAI apart is that Grok is trained only on public posts from X, which allows for more organic interactions and access to updated information. It also leverages Tesla’s resources to fine-tune its AI models.
