Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
It took us five years to get here, but Canon dictates that every tech company must have its AI bot in 2025. X is no exception: Since late 2023, speaking with its paid subscribers, known as Premium, the site has provided a chatbot created by xAI, its sibling firm. It appears that blue check accounts may have their built-in AI solution, However, the ordinary user with even a casual interest in AI will surely turn their attention to other alternatives such as paid or free like ChatGPT or Gemini.
Perhaps that will change this year: In December, xAI announced a free version of Grok, specifically the newest Grok-2 model, available to anyone with an X account. Today, if you click on the Grok tab on X, you’ll be able to access Grok, much like any other chatbot you’ve used. That’s fine and well for the curious among us still on X. But those who have fled for greener pastures haven’t been able to take advantage of this perk. That is, until now.
Grok is on iPhone, no X account is required
As of this week, Grok is now available as a free app on iOS—no strings attached. You don’t need an X account to use Grok, nor do you need to sign into any account. (Of course, you can connect your X account, or sign in via Apple, Google, or email.) Once you download the app, you can immediately ask Grok whatever it is you’d ask an AI chatbot. If you don’t sign in with X Premium, it seems the app is working off similar limitations to the free plan. That’s 10 requests every two hours, with three image analysis requests and four image generations per day.
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Of course, now it emerges, namely, whether people will use Grok at all. It’s possible. Writing this column, the app is ranked as the 4th most downloaded free app in the Apple Store iOS ranks below ChatGPT, and way ahead of Gemini ranking 49. (X is number 31, by the way.) But somehow I don’t think that it will be able to sustain those kinds of statistics for a long period. Of course, I know that X and the fans of Elon Musk will naturally migrate to Grok, but I believe that most people who have an interest in AI’s preoccupation will stay with what they know until Grok can do something they can’t (and/or do it better).
I’ll admit, Grok is fast: I hadn’t tried it myself until now, and the speed at which it responds to text-based queries is impressive. That said, I haven’t spent too much time with it, so I can’t swear by how accurate the results are—and as a relative AI-skeptic, I’m not likely to use it much. However, the one area I see Grok having an advantage (and not necessarily in a good way) is its lack of filter. This is an X Corp product, after all, which means Grok doesn’t have some of the restrictions and limitations that other services have put into place to prevent abuse. When it comes to image generation, you can make some wild stuff with Grok.
