Elon Musk now appears to be aggressively going after OpenAI (last valued at $157 billion) as his artificial intelligence firm – xAI – has begun testing a standalone app for the Grok AI chatbot, initially for iOS users. Positioning itself as a new competitor among AI chatbot players, the beta version of the Grok iOS app is currently available in Australia and a few other countries. This comes days after xAI made the latest version of the Grok chatbot free for all users of the social media platform X.
With a total of $12 billion raised so far, Grok is an artificial intelligence-powered chatbot launched in November 2023. However, it was initially made available exclusively to X users. But Grok (made open source in March this year) continues to evolve, like its competitors, with its distinctive language model Grok-1 in September 2023, followed by the launch of Grok-2 in August 2024. Unlike its competitors, which prioritize factual accuracy and neutrality, Grok is designed with a touch of whimsy and a rebellious streak. It is claimed to provide answers with a bit of humor and challenge conventional wisdom in its responses.
Coming back to the latest development, the iOS beta app is reportedly capable of providing users with access to real-time data from the internet and X. The app also features generative AI capabilities, such as rewriting text, summarizing long paragraphs, answering questions, and even generating images from text prompts. In fact, the company rolled out image-understanding features in October this year, allowing users to upload images and ask the chatbot questions about them. Earlier, Elon Musk had also confirmed the ongoing development of document understanding for Grok AI, enabling it to extract information from files like PDFs and Word documents.
According to the listing for this testing app, it is an AI-powered assistant designed to be as truthful, useful, and curious as possible. In a bid to increase its reach and provide easier accessibility to users, the company appears to be working on a dedicated website for the Grok chatbot—following the same strategy as ChatGPT and Gemini. Users will be able to access Grok via Grok.com on the web (currently showing just ‘coming soon’ on the screen).
At an estimated valuation of $40 billion, xAI counts several prominent venture capital firms among its investors, including Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz. The standalone chatbot app is becoming a reality at a time when xAI is primarily focused on building out its infrastructure to support AI research. As part of these efforts, the company is working to scale up its Colossus AI training system (which currently houses 100,000 Nvidia H100 graphics processing units), with a target of accommodating up to 1 million GPUs in the future. Located at a new facility in Memphis, Tennessee, the company is also planning to include next-generation Nvidia H200 GPUs in this supercomputer.
