Elon Musk-owned xAI has unveiled two new models of its AI chatbot, Grok, that is now capable of generating images and is reportedly equipped with advanced reasoning to carry out tasks such as writing code.
The newly released Grok-2 and Grok-2 Mini are currently in beta testing for users subscribed to the Premium and Premium+ packages on Musk’s social media platform, X.
“We are excited to release an early preview of Grok-2, a significant step forward from our previous model Grok-1.5, featuring frontier capabilities in chat, coding, and reasoning. At the same time, we are introducing Grok-2 mini, a small but capable sibling of Grok-2. An early version of Grok-2 has been tested on the LMSYS leaderboard under the name ‘sus-column-r,’” xAI said in a blog post on Wednesday, August 14.
Generating images using Grok-2
While a few app researchers and beta testers have claimed that Grok-2 is now better at writing code, generating text, and summarising news, the feature that is being talked about the most is the new AI model’s image-generation capabilities.
Soon after the limited release of Grok-2, users with access to the chatbot started posting images on X that have been purportedly created using Grok. Some of them were quick to point out that you can use Grok’s feature to create controversial, photo-realistic images of politicians and other prominent figures – indicating that there is a lack of guardrails built into the text-to-image model.