Elon Musk’s company has launched Grok-2 and Grok-2 mini in beta today, featuring enhanced reasoning abilities. The new Grok AI model can now create images on the X social network, although access to Grok is currently restricted to Premium and Premium+ users on X.
According to xAI, both Grok-2 and Grok-2 mini are now available to X users in beta form.
“We’re thrilled to unveil Grok-2, a major advancement from our previous Grok-1.5 model, with cutting-edge capabilities in chat, coding, and reasoning. We’re also introducing Grok-2 mini, a smaller yet powerful version of Grok-2. An early variant of Grok-2 has been tested under the name ‘sus-column-r’ on the LMSYS leaderboard,” xAI’s blog post stated.
xAI plans to make both models accessible to developers through its enterprise API later this month.
Initial user-generated images suggest that Grok’s image generation feature lacks restrictions on producing images of political figures, a fact that many users are currently exploiting. Given the upcoming U.S. presidential election, the company may face pressure to implement restrictions on these capabilities.
The text accompanying sample images indicates that Grok uses FLUX.1 by Black Forest Labs for image creation.
Details on Grok 2’s full capabilities are still scarce. App researcher and X feature tester Nima Owji suggested that Grok 2 excels in code generation, writing, and news summaries, though evidence supporting this is limited. Grok’s first version had notable issues with news summarization.
Without constraints on image creation, Grok could potentially be used to spread misinformation on X and other platforms. It’s also unclear if images generated by Grok include metadata indicating they are AI-generated.
We’ve reached out to X regarding how it plans to address potential misuse of image generation, and will update this story if we receive a response. However, the company has been infrequent in its responses to media inquiries since Musk’s acquisition.
xAI also mentioned plans to integrate Grok-2 and Grok-2 mini into AI-driven features on X, such as enhanced search, post analytics, and reply functions. This may include AI-powered responses. Additionally, xAI plans to showcase multimodal understanding as a key component of Grok’s features on X and its API.