xAI launched Grok-2 in August with image generation capacities, backed by Black Forest Labs’ FLUX.1 model. Late last month, the company also gave the model the ability to understand images.
All these features were available only to Premium and Premium+ users until now. By opening up Grok to free users, xAI is possibly looking for a more significant userbase and faster feedback cycle for its products, so that it can better compete with other models on the market like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.