Grok

Grok is the conversational artificial intelligence (AI) assistant built by SpaceXSI, the AI unit of SpaceX, which Elon Musk founded as xAI in July 2023 and which SpaceX acquired in February 2026. It launched in beta on X on November 3, 2023, pitched as a "maximally truth-seeking" AI with a witty, rebellious streak, and named for a made-up Martian verb from science fiction that means to understand something completely. What makes it different from most assistants is that it reads real-time information straight from the X feed, so it can answer questions about things that happened minutes ago instead of months ago.

What is Grok?

Grok is a chatbot, which is a program you talk to in plain language, and it runs on a large language model, a system trained on huge amounts of text so it can predict and produce language of its own. What sets it apart is how Elon positioned it and how it is wired up. He built it as an answer to rival chatbots he saw as too filtered, and he said: "Grok is a maximally truth-seeking AI, even if that truth is sometimes at odds with what is politically correct." Because it is plugged into X, it can read the live feed, so you can ask about a thread that is breaking right now and get an answer built on posts from moments ago.

Why Grok Exists

Elon founded xAI with a huge mission: "to understand the true nature of the universe," and to speed up scientific discovery. His argument was that an AI should be as curious and open as possible, instead of being boxed in by the safety filters and political slant he saw in the competition.

How it Works

Grok-1, which xAI released as open-source software in March 2024 under the free-to-use Apache 2.0 license, has 314 billion parameters, the adjustable numbers a model learns during training, in a mixture-of-experts design, a setup that switches on only a small part of the network for each chunk of text, here two of eight expert sub-models at a time, so it saves computing power. Each of the next two releases, Grok-1.5 and Grok-2, scored higher on the Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) benchmark, a broad exam that covers 57 different subjects.

The other way Grok improved is memory. A model's context window is how much text it can hold in mind at once, measured in tokens, where a token is a chunk of a word, and it decides whether the model can read a whole contract or a whole software project in one go. Grok-1.5 held 128,000 tokens in March 2024, and Grok 4.1 Fast holds 2 million. Grok 3, released in February 2025, was trained on Colossus, an xAI supercomputer with more than 200,000 graphics processing units (GPUs), the chips that do AI math in parallel.

The Economics of Grok

More chips, fed more data, make a stronger model, and as the model gets better the cost of each answer drops, which is the money logic behind every plan. Subscriptions run from SuperGrok Lite at $10 a month up to SuperGrok Heavy at $300, a ladder of prices that turns users into steady income across people who will pay very different amounts, and SpaceX's May 2026 filing for its initial public offering (IPO) counted about 1.9 million paying SuperGrok subscribers. On October 12, 2026, SpaceXSI introduced The X Subscription, one plan that brings together Grok, Grok Bot, Cursor, and X Premium, at $8 a month for Plus, $30 for Base Premium, $100 for Super, and $200 for Ultra; existing SuperGrok subscribers can keep their current plans. More money comes in through X Premium plans and through per-token pricing for developers who use Grok through its programming interface. Grok is the asset that carried xAI to a roughly $230 billion valuation and a $20 billion funding round in January 2026, backed by chipmaker NVIDIA and networking firm Cisco.

The State of Grok Today

Grok 4 came out in July 2025, and xAI reported that Grok 4 Heavy, using tools, scored 50.7% on the text-only part of Humanity's Last Exam, a test of expert-level questions across many subjects, the first result above 50%. The scores spread out sharply across tests of different difficulty.

The Grok 4.1 family, released on November 17, 2025, cut the hallucination rate, meaning how often the model gives a confident wrong answer, to 4.22%, roughly 65% lower than Grok 4 Fast, and Grok 4.1 Thinking came in first on an emotional-intelligence leaderboard. Grok 4.20 entered public beta in February 2026, Grok 4.5 followed on July 16, 2026, and Grok 4.6 on August 12. The current top model is Grok 4.7, which SpaceXSI calls its most capable model for coding and knowledge work. It is available in the Grok API, in Grok Build, SpaceXSI's coding tool, and in Cursor, the AI code editor SpaceX bought for $60 billion in August 2026. On October 14, 2026, SpaceXSI launched Grok Voice 3.0, which it calls the world's most intelligent speech-to-speech model, with replies in under a second and API pricing of $0.08 a minute, the same as Grok Voice 2.0. On October 22, 2026, SpaceXSI introduced its Partner Network for companies building products, solutions, and services with Grok. SpaceXSI says Starlink call centers use Grok Voice to answer 20,000 customer calls a day, about 70% of them with no human in the loop. SpaceX's IPO prospectus counted about 550 million monthly users across X and Grok on March 31, 2026, about 117 million of whom used Grok's AI features. Grok also writes Grokipedia, an AI-generated encyclopedia Elon launched in October 2025 as an alternative to Wikipedia.

What Comes Next

As of early October 2026, Grok 5 is in training on Colossus, as xAI first said in January 2026, and SpaceXSI has shipped three 4.x updates since July. SpaceX bought xAI on February 2, 2026, in a deal that valued SpaceX at $1 trillion and xAI at $250 billion, and SpaceX went public in June 2026. SpaceX now treats Grok as one layer in a connected stack that runs from AI to rockets to Starlink internet, which opens the door to an assistant that could one day reach you through hardware in space.

The Bottom Line

In under three years Grok went from a beta on X to the core AI product of SpaceX, public since June 2026, and its context window grew about 16 times larger along the way.