Grok stands for generative artificial intelligence chatbot, developed by Elon Musk in the year 2023. Grok was primarily developed for X and is currently available on the iOS app and its standalone website. Grok Chatbot is also advertised for its good sense of humor, but due to fewer restrictions on Grok Policies, Grok Chatbot has led to controversies that raise concerns about the platform’s content moderation and potential regulatory scrutiny.
How GrokAI Started
GrokAi was developed by xAI (a company founded by Elon Musk) in July 2023. Grok was developed for competing with existing platforms like ChatGPT from OpenAI and BARD, a name that commonly refers to a storyteller from Google.
Grok AI was founded under the guidence of Elon Musk and he was also one of the founder of Open AI. But what were the reasons for him to leave the breakthrough startup behind?
It was the idea of running Open AI that created conflicts between Musk and other founders. After leaving OpenAI, Elon Musk presented his views regarding AI transparency and regulations. Musk launched Xai in response to his concerns regarding AI transparency and regulatory oversight. The objective behind launching Grok was to create a platform with more transparency, fewer restrictions, and capable of providing more human-like interactions. The name ‘Grok’ is taken with the idea to understand something completely, which comes from a novel, ‘Stranger in a Strange Land.’.
The first version of GROK, which is Grok-1, was released in November 2023 and was initially available to only premium users of X. After more improvements, The next version, GROK-2, was launched in August 2024 with an image generation capability that had the ability to generate images from texts. In November 2024, Grok Chatbot was further developed with updated web search capabilities that allowed it to access and provide up-to-date information from the web. In December 2024, Grok was made available to all X users. Noe, the standalone web and iOS app, has been released for Grok in January 2025. It was initially available in Australia, but now Grok is available to users worldwide, with an aim of competing with other AI chatbots like OpenAI and BARD.
Grok AI can identify and diagnose medical injuries
Elon Musk claimed that Grok AI can diagnose medical injuries on his X post, following a story of a mother who claimed that Grok identified a fracture in her daughter’s wrist while the doctors denied it, and when the X-ray was rescanned, doctors confirmed that there was a fracture there, but his claim was denied by another user, and he later revealed Grok lacks the capability to diagnose any medical issues and must be consulted by the medical professionals for any healthcare advice or diagnosis.
The argument began with Musk’s statement on X about Grok AI to identify any medical injuries, which were later questioned by users, in which one of the replies he got from the handle ‘Liverdoc’ stated, ‘Hey Liar @elonmusk,’ and attached his screenshot of the answer asked from Grok AI about the medical diagnosis, to which the chatbot replied that it was not able to diagnose any medical injuries but instead, it could provide general information. Grok Chatbot also stated that it was meant to provide assistance and information, but diagnosis of any medical issue requires professional medical training and examination.
Can xAI’s Grok AI beat OpenAI’s ChatGPT?
Musk has announced that Grok-3 will be coming soon, which will be able to compute 10 times faster than Grok-2. But it still depends on many factors like popularity, quality of technology, scope of ecosystem, privacy concerns, etc.
As Grok is directly integrated with X, it is capable of providing up-to-date and in-depth knowledge about social media and what’s trending. Grok is also available to X users for free, whereas OpenAI comes with a subscription-based model. Grok can understand PDFs and can process visual inputs and generate images, which is similar to ChatGPT-4.
Talking about popularity, OpenAI is well established and is popular for its in-depth knowledge, creativity, and reasoning. OpenAI is often preferred for enterprises as it gets benefits from a rich ecosystem of APIs, integration, and developer tools. OpenAI is widely regarded as a leader in AI searches and applications.
As Grok is also in progressive mode and has not gained as much popularity as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, its compatibility will depend upon further advancement and market capture. OpenAI’s head start and robust ecosystem make it a formidable competitor, but Grok has unique advantages that could carve out its niche in the AI landscape.
