Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company, xAI, has launched its new Grok-2 and Grok-2 mini models in beta, promising significant advances in reasoning and image generation capabilities. Although access to Grok is currently limited to X users with Premium and Premium+ subscriptions, these innovations mark an important step forward in the evolution of AI on the platform.

 

Grok-2 Advances and Features

According to a blog post from xAI, Grok-2 represents a step forward from its predecessor, Grok-1.5. The new model improves key areas such as conversation, coding, and reasoning. Additionally, the company has introduced Grok-2 mini, a smaller yet equally powerful version of its larger counterpart. An initial version of Grok-2 was tested on the LMSYS leaderboard under the name “sus-column-r,” suggesting that it has already passed some preliminary evaluations.

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In the first images generated by users, it has been observed that Grok's image generation feature still lacks clear restrictions for creating images of political figures, which many users have taken advantage of by creating images of Republican candidate Donald Trump. With the U.S. presidential election around the corner, the company is likely to face pressure to implement limits on these features. It has been indicated that Grok uses FLUX.1 by Black Forest Labs to create these images, according to the text accompanying the sample images generated.

 

 

Future Plans and Challenges

xAI also plans to make both models available to developers through its enterprise API later this month. However, there is still little information available about Grok-2's actual capabilities. Nima Owji, an app researcher and X feature tester, claimed that Grok-2 performs better in code generation, writing, and news, although there isn't enough evidence to support these claims yet. It is worth noting that Grok's first version made several mistakes when summarizing news, raising some doubts about the accuracy of these new models.

The launch of Grok-2 and Grok-2 mini marks a milestone in AI development by Musk's company, though it remains to be seen how these models will evolve and how xAI will address the challenges related to generating sensitive content, especially in the current political context. The expectation is that these advances could significantly transform the way users interact with AI on the X platform.