1 day Ago By Ratul Maitra
Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence venture, xAI, is taking its chatbot Grok beyond X’s platform with the beta testing of a dedicated iOS application, as per a TechCrunch report . The app is currently live in Australia and is undergoing Beta testing in a few other countries. The app store preview of the iOS application lists features such as image generation, providing users real-time information in response to their queries using data from X and the web, the ability to maintain a conversational tone, and ensuring privacy when it comes to handling user data, etc.
Why it Matters Notably, the move marks a further expansion of the audience for the AI assistant, which was previously accessible only to X (formerly Twitter) users. This changed in November 2024, when xAI started testing a free version of the chatbot, and made it available for all users earlier in December. This also coincides with the company recently securing its $6 billion Series C funding, which increased its total valuation to around $45 billion.
This included participation from investors such as Andreessen Horowitz, Blackrock, Fidelity, Lightspeed, MGX, Morgan Stanley and others. The list of investors also included “strategic investors” Nvidia and AMD, who the company said continue to support its rapid upscaling of infrastructure. Models at Work As part of its announcement, xAI observed that Grok 3, its most powerful model yet, was in training and that its future consumer and enterprise offerings would leverage the power of its AI models.
Earlier this month, X released its image generation tool Aurora for a short period of time before pulling it from their platform. Available momentarily through the Grok tab on the X mobile app as well as the website and touted by users for the photorealistic nature of images it generated, “Grok 2+Aurora (Beta)” was later confirmed by Elon Musk on the site to be under works. Also Read: Support our journalism: For You.
