Elon Musk's AI company, xAI, is testing out a standalone iOS app for its chatbot, Grok, which was available only to X users until now.

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xAI, Elon Musk’s AI company, may be embroiled in an escalating lawsuit with OpenAI. But that’s not stopping it from shipping new products — on a Friday night, no less. This evening, xAI revealed that it has begun to roll out an upgraded version of its flagship Grok 2 chatbot model to all users on […]

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X, the Elon Musk-owned social network previously known as Twitter, quietly added a new image generator to its Grok assistant this past Saturday. Then, it removed it. Now, it’s bringing it back — and officially announcing it. The image generator, called Aurora, was developed by Musk’s AI company, xAI, and trained on billions of examples from the […]

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• On Saturday, some users of Elon Musk's X saw Grok running a new image generator called Aurora.
• The new model appears to have more photorealistic generations than the prior Flux model.
• Aurora hasn't been widely released, though reports indicate it has few limits on what it creates.

For a few hours on Saturday, some users of Elon Musk's X reported having access to Aurora, a new, more photorealistic image generator powered by Musk's artificial intelligence model, Grok.

While Aurora has not been widely released — and some users who reported having access to it later said their Grok had reverted to its older model, Flux — the brief glimpse at the newer model offered the first insight into how it compares to its predecessor and competitors.

Aurora's detailed generations are a notable improvement from Grok's Flux model and appear to rival the output of other models such as OpenAI's DALL·E 3.

TechCrunch reported Aurora's beta version — like Flux's — appears to have few creative limitations, and in brief tests created images of copyrighted characters like Mickey Mouse and public figures, including a depiction of a "bloodied Donald Trump," but "stopped short of nudes." In tests by Business Insider, Grok's Flux version also created images of Mickey Mouse but refused to create any violent imagery.

On X, users with access to the model shared photos of Aurora's creations, including images of Ray Romano and Adam Sandler on a sitcom set and Musk boxing with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

While the images gained praise online for their quality and realism, there was still some evidence that they were AI-generated, such as unusual proportions in the arms and hands and an uncanny smoothness to some facial and skin features.

"X AI casually releasing one of the best image models on a Saturday at 2am... @xai y'all are built different," Guillaume Verdon, the founder of AI startup Extropic and of the effective accelerationism movement, which supports AI growth and development without guardrails or regulation, wrote in a post tagging xAI, Musk's artificial intelligence company that created Grok.

Musk replied to Verdo, who goes by Based Beff Jezos online, saying, "Just the beta version, but it will improve very fast."

Representatives for X did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

The AI chatbot within X, Grok, is now free for all users - but with some limits.

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Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, is reportedly preparing to release a stand-alone consumer app. That’s according to The Wall Street Journal, which reports that the upcoming app will be similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, allowing users to access xAI’s Grok chatbot from their personal devices. The app will likely arrive after xAI closes its next funding […]

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• Elon Musk's AI startup xAI has been valued at a reported $50 billion, 16 months after its founding.
• It hit the milestone nearly nine years faster than it took rival OpenAI to cross the threshold.
• The funding round widens the valuation gap between xAI and its rivals like Anthropic and Perplexity.

Elon Musk has a certified rocketship in his hands — and, no, we're not talking about SpaceX.

One of his other companies, his artificial-intelligence startup xAI, has catapulted from launch just 16 months ago into an AI company now worth a reported $50 billion.

The chart below underlines just how rapid xAI's rise has been.

So how does that $50 billion compare to the competition?

It took OpenAI, last valued at $157 billion in October, about nine years to reach the $50 billion milestone, according to PitchBook data.

Elon Musk, starting with a team of 12 people in July 2023, did it in less than a year and a half.

The $50 billion valuation furthers the valuation gap between xAI and smaller rivals like Anthropic (valued at $19 billion) and Perplexity (valued at $2.8 billion), and has it approaching the market cap of companies like the fast-fashion giant Shein, which was valued at $66 billion last year.

It's also a testament to the high level of investor interest in the so-called Musk economy of companies he oversees — and his ability to raise vast sums of money quickly (also see the billions in funding Musk quickly put together to support his acquisition of Twitter).

The startup, which created the AI chatbot Grok and the large language model Grok-2 that underpins it, recently set up an AI data center brimming with Nvidia H100 chips. Musk said the process took 122 days — and the startup plans to double the number of AI chips in the center in the coming months.