Elon Musk-owned xAI has added image-understanding capabilities to its Grok AI model. This means that paid users on his social platform X, who have access to the AI chatbot, can upload an image and ask the AI questions about it.
An xAI employee and the official @grok handle posted to X about the update on Monday.
In a separate post, Musk said that Grok can even explain the meaning of a joke using the new image understanding feature. He added that the functionality is in the early stages — suggesting it will “rapidly improve”.
In August, Musk’s AI company released the Grok-2 model, an enhanced version of the chatbot which included image generation capabilities using the FLUX.1 model by Black Forest Labs. As with earlier releases, Grok-2 was made available for developers or premium (paying) X users.
At that time, xAI said a future release would add multimodal understanding to Grok on X and to the model it offers via developer API.
Grok may soon also understand documents, per a Musk reply to user who criticized the model for not being able to handle certain file formats (such as PDFs). “Not for long,” Musk responded, claiming: “We are getting done in months what took everyone else years.”
The social network has been trying to add more features to both the AI chatbot and paid user tiers on X to make the offering more attractive. Earlier this month, X rolled out a new tool called Radar for Premium+ subscribers to observe real-time trends and provide insights into conversations.