[ad_1]
X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter and now owned by billionaire Elon Musk, has launched Grok AI in India for its Premium+ subscribers. Developed by Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI, Grok serves as an advanced chatbot that can provide detailed answers to user questions.
The Premium+ package with Grok costs Rs 2,299 per month or Rs 22,900 per year if you subscribe via mobile, making it more expensive than ChatGPT Plus. For desktop users, the monthly and annual rates are lower at Rs 1,300 and Rs 13,600 respectively.
For now, access to Grok is limited solely to Premium+ subscribers, marking it as an exclusive benefit. X’s premium+ level offers a range of other benefits, such as an advertising-free experience, a blue verification, possibilities to generate income, longer messages, HD video uploads, message processing, playing videos in the background, video downloads and more.
Grok’s generative AI chatbot interface offers two modes: fun and normal. As the names suggest, Fun mode offers more informal and humorous responses, while Normal mode offers standard and straightforward responses.
A key advantage that Grok has over other language models is its ability to leverage real-time data from the X platform. This allows it to generate accurate, timely responses based on recent events and trends unfolding on X.
xAI claims that despite having 63.2 billion parameters, Grok-1 surpasses GPT-3.5, which powers the free version of the leading chatbot ChatGPT. Furthermore, they claim that Grok-0, the predecessor with 33 billion parameters, can outperform Meta’s LLaMA 2, which has 70 billion parameters for tasks such as coding and mathematical word problems.
In November, some users pointed out the presence of phrases in Grok’s comments, such as “cannot fulfill the request as it violates OpenAI’s use case policy.” This raised concerns that OpenAI’s code may have been used.
However, XAI’s chief engineer Igor Babuschkin made it clear that Grok has been trained on vast amounts of Internet data, including some of the content generated by GPT. He called it a very rare occurrence and assured that no OpenAI code was directly used in building Grok.
The launch of Grok AI in India represents growing competition in the generative AI space as companies race to make chatbots accessible to the public. With rivals like ChatGPT, Claude, Character.ai and others in the mix, xAI aims to differentiate Grok by leveraging X’s real-time data and optimizing it for the platform’s power users.
But pricing could be an obstacle in a price-sensitive market like India, limiting Grok’s reach mainly to affluent users for now. As xAI iterates on the technology and expands access, it remains to be seen whether Grok can differentiate itself enough to become the go-to AI chatbot of Indian users.