There’s a mobile app for Grok rolling out from xAI on iOS. The standalone app marks a major step in taking the bot beyond the confines of X (formerly Twitter). While it’s still only in beta testing in Australia and a few other places, Grok is clearly ready to take its place among AI chatbot apps like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude.
The mobile app mimics the main features of Grok and employs the same Grok-2 AI model. The app will rewrite and summarize text, answer questions, and create images from text prompts. It can access real-time data from the web and X as well. Grok was previously exclusive to paying X subscribers. But in November, xAI started testing a free version of the chatbot and rolling it out to all users earlier this month. The company is also working on a dedicated website, Grok.com, which promises to make the chatbot even more widely available.
Grok the picture
One of Grok’s standout features is its image-generation capability. xAI claims that Grok excels at “photorealistic rendering,” and unlike some competitors, it doesn’t impose strict limitations on what you can create. Grok can also analyze pictures uploaded by users. Imagine pointing your phone camera at a plant and getting instant insights about its species or health.
The use of the image generator is interesting since the Flux AI image creator, relied on by the chatbot on X, has a laid-back approach to copyright and trademark. That has led to people getting in trouble for making images of characters like Mario, with Nintendo’s copyright infringement hunter Tracer going after them for infringement. Instead, the Grok app may use Aurora, an image model that xAI very briefly released before it vanished again.
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