xAI launches Grok AI chatbot in Europe

Artificial Intelligence (AI) company xAI has launched the Grok AI chatbot for social media X (formerly Twitter) users in Europe. The announcement comes via the X Global Government Affairs handle and confirms that the chatbot is available for Premium subscribers.

Grok was designed and developed by xAI and launched last November. It is modeled after Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which makes it different from competitors including OpenAI and Gemini.

Soon after launch, xAI integrated this chatbot with social media site X but for Premium+ subscribers, a paid tier that costs $16 per month. However, it later introduced the model to a lower Premium subscription for wider availability.

Grok could be accessed from the side menu bar on the web and the bottom bar on mobile. The interface includes a prompt box and a send button. Users can choose between two modes:

1. Regular
2. Fun

These modes provide answers according to their naming schemes.

Over the past three months, xAI has made new improvements to the speed and efficiency of the Grok model. The company has recently introduced Grok 1.5 with improved reasoning, long context understanding, and a fast response rate.

Its performance improvement includes coding and math-related tasks. Tests show that the new 1.5 model is about 10-20 percent faster than Grok 1.0. Its long context token window has expanded to 128,000 tokens with 16 times increased memory capacity.

Last month, xAI introduced Grok-1.5 Vision Preview (1.5V), a first-generation multimode Grok model. It can process a wide range of visual information including documents, diagrams, charges, screenshots, and photographs.

Importantly, Grok 1.5 and 1.5V are only available for internal beta testing. However, soon it may be released to all of the Premium subscribers.