Grok
In plain wordsThe AI chatbot and model family of Elon Musk's company xAI, launched in 2023 and built into the social network X. It is known for its irreverent style and for repeated controversies over its outputs.
xAIxAI, prop. n.: An artificial intelligence company founded by Elon Musk in 2023 that makes the Grok chatbot. It is now part of Musk's rocket company, SpaceX.'s family of large language modelslarge language model, n.: A computer program trained on enormous amounts of text to predict the words that come next. At vast scale, that simple skill lets it chat, answer questions, translate, summarize and write code. and the chatbot that runs on them, available inside the social network X (the former Twitter) as well as through standalone apps and an API. Launched in November 2023 as an assistant designed to answer 'with a bit of wit' and with real-time access to posts on X, it was positioned by Elon MuskElon Musk, prop. n.: A South African-born American entrepreneur who runs Tesla and SpaceX, co-founded OpenAI, founded the AI company xAI, and has long warned that AI could endanger humanity. as less restricted than its rivals. xAI released the weights of Grok-1, a 314-billion-parameter mixture-of-expertsmixture of experts, n.: A way to build very large AI models cheaply: the model contains many specialist sub-networks, and for each word only a few are switched on, picked by a small dispatcher network. model, in March 2024. Later versions were trained on xAI's Colossus supercomputer in Memphis, Tennessee: Grok 3 (February 2025) added a reasoning mode, and Grok 4 (July 2025) claimed leading scores on several reasoning benchmarks. The service has drawn repeated criticism, notably in July 2025, when after a change to its system prompt it posted antisemitic content on X, and around the turn of 2026, when its image tools were used to create sexualized images of real people without their consent, prompting regulatory investigations in several countries.
Ask Grok about a breaking story and it will cite posts from X that appeared minutes ago.
Origin
Announced by xAI on 4 November 2023. The name comes from Robert A. Heinlein's novel Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), in which to grok means to understand something intuitively and completely; xAI also cited The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as a model for its tone.
Usage note
Its incidents are often cited in debates about system-prompt governance, content moderationcontent moderation, n.: Checking what people post, or what an AI produces, and removing, limiting or labeling whatever breaks the rules or the law — done by people, by AI, or by both together. and the tuning of models toward political goals. Not to be confused with grokkinggrokking, n.: When a model that has merely memorized its training examples suddenly, long afterward, figures out the underlying rule and starts getting new examples right., a training phenomenon, or with Groq, a chip company.
Related
- xAIxAI, prop. n.: An artificial intelligence company founded by Elon Musk in 2023 that makes the Grok chatbot. It is now part of Musk's rocket company, SpaceX.
- large language modellarge language model, n.: A computer program trained on enormous amounts of text to predict the words that come next. At vast scale, that simple skill lets it chat, answer questions, translate, summarize and write code.
- Elon MuskElon Musk, prop. n.: A South African-born American entrepreneur who runs Tesla and SpaceX, co-founded OpenAI, founded the AI company xAI, and has long warned that AI could endanger humanity.
- ChatGPTChatGPT, prop. n.: OpenAI's AI chatbot, released free to the public in November 2022, which answers questions, writes and converses in everyday language. Its sudden popularity began the current AI boom.
- content moderationcontent moderation, n.: Checking what people post, or what an AI produces, and removing, limiting or labeling whatever breaks the rules or the law — done by people, by AI, or by both together.
- open-weight modelopen-weight model, n.: An AI model whose trained internal numbers are published for anyone to download and run on their own computers, even if the data and code used to make it stay private.
Mentioned in
xAIxAI, prop. n.: An artificial intelligence company founded by Elon Musk in 2023 that makes the Grok chatbot. It is now part of Musk's rocket company, SpaceX.