Elon Musk drops Grok 2 — the X-based AI chatbot is now more powerful and can make images

Grok chatbot next to a photo of Elon Musk.
(Image credit: Unite.AI/GettyImages)

X has had its own AI chatbot, Grok, for a while, but it'd be fair to say it's not mentioned in the same way that OpenAI's ChatGPT or Google Gemini are.

That's not for the want of trying, though, and with a huge user base of X users providing data for the model, a new version was always expected.

Now. the obviously-named Grok-2 has entered beta. In a new blog post, X says it represents "a significant step forward from our previous model Grok-1.5, featuring frontier capabilities in chat, coding, and reasoning."

"At the same time, we are introducing Grok-2 mini, a small but capable sibling of Grok-2. An early version of Grok-2 has been tested on the LMSYS leaderboard under the name "sus-column-r." At the time of this blog post, it is outperforming both Claude 3.5 Sonnet and GPT-4-Turbo."

Grok-2 outperforms Claude 3.5 Sonnet and GPT-4-Turbo

Grok AI benchmark results

(Image credit: X)

So, what's new? As the graph above shows, the overall Elo score for an early model of Grok-2 beats out every comparable chatbot except for ChatGPT-4o and Google Gemini.

X also says that Grok-2 and its Mini counterpart "achieve performance levels competitive to other frontier models in areas such as graduate-level science knowledge (GPQA), general knowledge (MMLU, MMLU-Pro), and math competition problems (MATH)," while also pointing to vision-based tasks as an area of improvement.

Grok will also gain a new interface on X, as well as the option to generate images with a prompt. This is achieved through the integration of the popular Flux AI image generation model from Black Forest Labs.

Grok will be offered through a new enterprise API later this month, which X is promising will offer a "bespoke tech stack" as well as mandatory multi-factor authentication.

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Lloyd Coombes
Contributing writer

Lloyd Coombes is a freelance tech and fitness writer. He's an expert in all things Apple as well as in computer and gaming tech, with previous works published on TechRadar, Tom's Guide, Live Science and more. You'll find him regularly testing the latest MacBook or iPhone, but he spends most of his time writing about video games as Gaming Editor for the Daily Star. He also covers board games and virtual reality, just to round out the nerdy pursuits.