Elon Musk’s xAI launches Grok-2 and Grok-2 Mini AI models in beta

The Grok-2 family of artificial intelligence (AI) models has finally been released into beta by xAI. The Elon Musk-owned AI company launched Grok-2 and Grok-2 Mini on Tuesday, claiming newer capabilities and improvements to its large language models (LLMs). Both models are available to Premium and Premium+ X users (formerly known as Twitter). Interestingly, the Grok-2 models come with image generation capabilities, but these are powered by a third-party AI model. The company claims that Grok-2 outperformed GPT-4 Turbo in benchmarks.

Grok-2 AI models released in beta

In a blog postxAI announced the launch of the two new Grok AI models, saying: “We are excited to release an early preview of Grok-2, a significant step forward from our previous model Grok-1.5, with groundbreaking capabilities in chat, coding, and reasoning. At the same time, we are introducing Grok-2 mini, a small but capable sibling of Grok-2.”

The new interface of the Grok AI chatbot
Photo credit: xAI

Grok-2 is a state-of-the-art (SOTA) AI model, while Grok-2 Mini is a smaller language model derived from Grok-2 that can generate faster and more accurate responses. Both models are available in the Grok chatbot for X Premium and X Premium+ users. Users must update to the latest version of the app to access the new AI models.

The company claimed that an early version of Grok was tested on the Large Model Systems Organization (LMSYS) classification under the name “sus-column-r” and that it outperformed both the Claude 2.5 Sonnet and the GPT-4 Turbo.

The official LMSYS X-handle also has confirmed this and highlighted that Grok-2 showed high performance in coding and math where it ranked second, and hard prompts where it ranked fourth. At this time, no other technical information is known about the AI ​​models, database or architecture.

In addition, xAI revealed that the company has redesigned the Grok AI interface and added new features. One of these is the ability to generate images. However, this ability is outsourced by the Flux.1 model created by Black Forest Labs. A TechCrunch report claims that the image generation model has no security features and can generate images of politicians.