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When Grok launched in November 2023, it quickly caught headlines as Elon Musk’s entry into the LLM market. With the ability to access real-time posts on X and top-tier capabilities in chat, coding, reasoning, and image generation, Grok has become a less heavily moderated alternative to ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.
So, what can Grok do? In this article, we examine how Grok works, explore its core capabilities, and discuss the most common use cases you can try out yourself.
Key Takeaways
- Grok is an AI chatbot produced by Elon Musk’s x.AI.
- The Grok 2 model demonstrates high-performance chat, coding, and reasoning capabilities.
- Grok 3 is coming soon, with early reposts suggesting it can understand nuanced riddles.
- x.AI says Grok answers users’ questions with a “bit of wit.”
- The chatbot offers less content moderation than competitors like ChatGPT and Claude.
- We recommend fact-checking Grok’s outputs to avoid being misinformed by hallucinations.
What Is Grok? The “Humorous” Chatbot Is Serious Enough
Grok is a generative AI chatbot that users can interact with via natural language commands. As of February 12, 2025, Grok has been using the Grok 2 large language model (LLM) that demonstrates strong chat, coding, and reasoning capabilities.
However, xAI might be ready to release a new Grok 3 version very soon.
Cool!
And Grok 3 is coming soon. Pretraining is now complete with 10X more compute than Grok 2. https://t.co/54j81EEOF5
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 4, 2025
And that’s not all. New versions, Grok 4 and Grok 5, are planned for release later in 2025 and 2026, respectively. Additionally, Musk confirmed that Grok will soon be integrated into Tesla vehicles, allowing drivers to interact with the chatbot while driving.
Some users who got early access to the Grok 3 model reported that Grok 3 even understood a nuanced riddle that OpenAI models have failed to solve.
Breaking 🚨 Grok 3 understands nuanced riddle that ALL of open ai models have failed to get right. The only other model to get this question right was Deepseek R1 🤯
Grok 3 is beating o1? Has @xai caught up this fast ? pic.twitter.com/WLSpM00qHK
— Chris (@chatgpt21) January 26, 2025
What makes Grok stand apart is its real-time access to the web and posts on X, which allows it to use a wide range of sources when answering your queries.
One of the key selling points of Grok is that it has significantly less content moderation than competitors like ChatGPT and Claude. In fact, x.AI claims the assistant is designed to answer user questions with a “bit of wit” and has a “rebellious streak.”
However, David Shoemaker, professor of philosophy at Cornell University, believes that Grok is not funny at all. He said:
“The ‘sarcasm’ of Grok is about as funny as Musk himself, which is to say: not much.”
Grok Access & Price
Is Grok free? Not entirely.
Free Grok Access
Users can access Grok by navigating to the X website and clicking on Grok in the toolbar view. Once opened, they can interact with Grok by entering a written prompt into the Ask Anything prompt box.
Subscription Plans
- X Premium (formerly Twitter Blue): $8 monthly or $84 annually
- X Premium+: $16 per month or $168 annually
Both tiers offer access to Grok AI, with Premium+ providing an ad-free experience on X and potentially faster access to new features.
Enterprise API
xAI also announced an Enterprise API for businesses and developers looking to integrate Grok into their projects.
As of December 2024, xAI has reduced the Grok API pricing to $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens. Earlier, the price was $5 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens.
To get started, developers can sign up at console.x.ai and get $25 in free API credits per month.
How to Use Grok: 8 Possible Scenarios
So, what can you do with Grok AI? We’ve compiled a list of eight viable use cases.
1. Answering Questions
One of the simplest ways to use Grok is to ask it a question in plain text. Simply enter your question into the text box and press Enter or the “Grok Something” arrow on the right-hand side of the screen.
In the example below, we asked Grok, “When was the wheel invented,” and received a brief summary detailing the origins of the wheel:
If you decide to ask Grok questions, we recommend fact-checking the output, as LLMs often provide incorrect information in response to user prompts.
You may also notice logical inconsistencies in the chatbot’s responses. For instance, in this output, Grok implies that 3200 BCE occurred later than 3500 to 3300 BCE.
2. Creating Images
You can also ask Grok to create images. Enter a written prompt explaining what type of image you want to create. Press Enter, and the model will generate four images in response. Each image is marked with a watermark in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen.
To demonstrate this, we asked Grok to “Create a picture of a flower.”
Unlike many other image-generation tools, Grok can generate images of public figures.
During our test, we created images of President Biden and President Trump, which ChatGPT refused to generate.
Grok’s decision to enable users to create deepfakes of public figures has been controversial, with the potential for bad actors to use them to create propaganda, disinformation, and hateful content.
3. Text Summarisation
You can also use Grok to summarize texts via text input or file. However, text summarization for files is only available for Premium users, as the chatbot told us to sign up for Premium when we attempted to input a PDF.
Therefore, to test the model’s text summarization capabilities, we instructed the model to summarize an article on Cancer treatment from WebMD.
As a result, Grok gave us a succinct summary of the article’s content broken down into multiple sections.
However, given that LLMs tend to hallucinate, we recommend fact-checking text summarizations to ensure that the chatbot provides an accurate summary of the source text.
4. Content Creation
Grok can also generate written content. For instance, you could use the assistant to write an article, blog post, case study, or whitepaper. You can do this by entering a written prompt telling the model what type of content you want to create.
To test Grok’s content creation capabilities, we asked Grok to “write an email newsletter about this week’s most important developments in AI.”
The model’s output was detailed and had its merits, but the paragraphs’ formatting was unusual.
The output text was also quite generic and required additional work by a human writer.
5. News Roundups
With a real-time connection to the internet and X, Grok can also be a news summary tool. To test this, we asked Grok, “What’s the news today?”
You can switch between X Posts and web pages at the top of the screen to determine whether you see content from X or third-party sites.
In another test, we asked the chatbot, “What are the top posts on X today?”
This prompt got Grok to return a passable summary of the top posts on X, but the output felt incomplete. We got a more comprehensive rundown of the top posts on the platform by clicking on the Explore tab and navigating to the Trending section.
6. X Threads Summary
Grok’s real-time connection to X also allows it to summarize post threads. We decided to test this capability by seeing if it could summarize a thread created by Sam Altman.
To do this, we entered “Can you summarise this X thread?” and linked to the post in question.
For this task, Grok did a good job of summarizing the overall gist of the thread. It could definitely be used to give a quick rundown of a more complex conversation.
7. Translation
Grok also offers access to translation capabilities across multiple languages. Users can copy and paste text into the text box or upload a file to start a translation.
To test Grok’s translation, we copied and pasted the text from a Spanish CNN article speculating on TikTok’s future during the Trump administration and instructed the LLM to “translate the following text to English.”
Grok performed roughly on par with a similar translation we cross-referenced with Google Translate.
While the translation results seemed adequate, we recommend fact-checking the output text in case any hallucinations take place.
8. Creating Quizzes
If you want to use Grok as an educational tool, you can create a quiz. Grok can provide you with a written list of quiz questions and answers.
To test Grok’s quiz generation, we entered a written prompt instructing the model to “give a quiz on SEO.”
While Grok returned a comprehensive set of questions and answers, the user would inevitably have to verify that the answers provided were correct, either through their own knowledge or a third-party source.
The Bottom Line
Grok is an extremely versatile tool. In just a short time, it’s become one of the most exciting chatbots on the market, and now it’s free for anyone to try out.
Just remember that LLMs do have a tendency to hallucinate, so you should take any factual or logical claims made by the chatbot with a pinch of salt. This way, you’ll avoid being influenced by misinformation.
