UX gets a faster Grok model and a new ‘Grok button’

XAI, Elon Musk’s AI company, may be embroiled in a growing lawsuit with OpenAI. But that doesn’t stop new products from being shipped – Friday night, even less.

In the evening, xAI revealed that it has started rolling out an improved version of its Grok 2 chat model to all users on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. (IX, which Musk also owns, often serves as a testing ground for Grok variants.) The upgraded Grok is “three times faster,” xAI says in a blog post, and offers “improved accuracy, instruction tracking, and more— language skills.”

Free users can only ask Grok ten questions every two hours. Subscribers to X’s Premium and Premium+ plans get higher usage limits.

XAI also announced tonight the addition of a “Grok” button on the X, which the company says is designed to help users find “relevant content, understand real-time events, and dive deeper into trending conversations.”

And the developers say they are making a few changes to its business API.

XAI’s API has new Grok models for better performance and multilingual functionality, xAI said. As a result of efficiency gains, the prices are reduced from $5 per million input tokens (~750,000 words) or $15 million output tokens to $2 per million input tokens and 10 million output tokens.

In the coming weeks, xAI’s image generation model, Aurora, will also come to the API, xAI said. Aurora, an unfiltered AI image, was released on X this month for the Grok chatbot experience.