Social media platform X, which was founded by Elon Musk, has been offering its AI chatbot named Grok only to users who pay for premium membership. However, it now seems that the company might be planning to allow free users to access Grok as well.
Over the past weekend, some app researchers and users shared information suggesting that a free version of Grok has started to be available in specific locations. For example, TechCrunch has confirmed that X is testing this free access for users in New Zealand.
One researcher, known as Swak on the platform, provided details about how the free version of Grok might work for users. Currently, there are limits on how often users can ask questions. For instance, with the Grok-2 model, users can ask up to 10 questions every two hours, and with the smaller Grok-2 mini model, they can ask a total of 20 questions in the same timeframe. Additionally, users can pose up to three questions per day that involve analyzing images.
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To be able to access Grok for free, users must have an account that is at least a week old and needs to have a phone number linked to it.
Grok-2, which has the ability to generate images, was launched by xAI in August. It uses a model developed by Black Forest Labs called FLUX.1, and last month, the AI was updated to understand images as well. Until recently, these features were exclusive to paying Premium and Premium+ users only. By making Grok available to free users, xAI seems to be trying to grow its user base and gather feedback more quickly on its products. This move is part of a strategy to better compete with other well-known AI models available today, such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.
