Grok AI Chatbot Gains Image Understanding Capabilities, Catching Up with Rivals

Grok gets eyes -- X-based chatbot can now analyze images

Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company, xAI, has unveiled a major new update to its AI assistant called Grok. The latest iteration now incorporates vision capabilities, enabling Grok to analyze and comprehend images, alongside its existing text functionalities. Grok can already generate images using the Flux model from Black Forest Labs and it was the last of the major AI chat products not to include image analysis, also known as AI vision. With the introduction of this vision feature, Grok can analyze images linked to posts on the X platform, interpret visual content such as documents, diagrams, and photographs and understand spatial relationships within images to help better describe the contents. You could use this to come up with recipe ideas based on a photo of ingredients, identify the location of a landmark inside a photo shared on X or even explain the results of a graph. The last part could be particularly useful on a news-heavy platform like Grok. Users will soon notice a new button on posts containing images on the X platform. When clicked it sends the image to Grok, allowing users to pose questions or request analyses of the visual content. It could also be used to help with describing images for people with sight issues. We haven't seen official benchmarks yet but according to xAI Grok's vision capabilities hold their own against established models from OpenAI, Google and Anthropic. To this end, the company has introduced a new benchmark, RealWorldQA, designed to evaluate the model's proficiency in understanding and reasoning about the physical world through images. The announcement led to varied reactions from the AI community and users with some enthusiastic about how fast Grok is advancing, while others remained cautious, questioning its performance against established AI models. Elon Musk-owned xAI has a 200,000 GPU data center built for the sole purpose of training future versions of Grok. I think it's safe to say we're going to see big things from the model in the future. Specifically related to vision capabilities, these could find their way into robots. Musk owns Tesla, which also has its own robotics division. In the future, we may also see video and voice analysis from Grok as these are features already in place with Gemini and ChatGPT. While this update marks a notable advancement for Grok, it's clear that the model is still in development compared to more mature AI models like Gemini or ChatGPT. As with all rapidly evolving AI technologies, we'll need to monitor both the upgraded capabilities and the ethical considerations of these developments in the months ahead.

Grok AI Gets Image Understanding Capabilities

xAI, an Elon Musk-founded company runs Grok and is responsible for the timely updates to the chatbot. Grok, an AI (artificial intelligence) tool or AI chatbot available for premium subscribers of X has received a fresh capability. This capability is to understand the image fed into the chat. xAI, an Elon Musk-founded company runs Grok and is responsible for the timely updates to the chatbot. With this new capability, users can upload images and Grok will analyse them and give answers based on what the users are asking. This capability will be available on Grok-2, the most intelligent AI model from xAI so far. Grok-2 was released much recently in August 2024. Read More - OnePlus Launches OxygenOS 15: New AI Features + Parallel Processing Grok AI's new image understanding feature is also known as computer vision. The AI system is able to see and process the visual data from an image or a video. At present, the feature would only work for static images on Grok. We can expect the company to offer similar support for videos in the near future. Read More - Qualcomm Unveils Snapdragon 8 Elite - Details Here Grok can also generate brilliant images based on the prompts given by the users. This feature has been available for some time now with the launch of Grok-2. Elon Musk also shared about the arrival of this new feature on his X profile. With this new feature, Grok can understand the images and explain and answer questions. The feature is now live for the users to try. However, only X Premium subscribers who have access to Grok can try it. There's no completely free version of Grok available for the users at the moment. Note that Computer Vision is not a new or unique feature in the industry. Many other existing chatbots including ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, and more already offer this feature.

xAI adds image understanding capabilities to Grok | TechCrunch

Elon Musk-owned xAI has added image-understanding capabilities to its Grok AI model. With that, paid users on X social platform can upload an image and ask the AI chatbot questions about it. One of the xAI employees and the official Grok handle posted about this update on X. In a separate post, Musk said that Grok can even explain the meaning of a joke through the new image understanding feature. He added that the functionality is in the early stages and will improve along the way. In August, Musk's AI company released Grok-2 as a model and in the form of a chatbot for premium users on X. The chatbot on the social network also gained image-generation capabilities using FLUX.1 model by Black Forest Labs. At that time, xAI said that it would release multimodal understanding as part of Grok's experience on X and the developer API. Grok might also understand the documents soon. In a reply to a user's feedback about Grok not being able to handle photos or PDFs, Musk said, "Not for long. We are getting done in months what took everyone else years." The social network has been trying to add more features to the AI chatbot and the paid user tiers 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.

Grok gets glasses to see what you're talking about

X (formerly Twitter) Premium subscribers can now ask the Grok AI assistant to describe images, not just make them. The Elon Musk-owned company xAI unveiled a new feature for visual content analysis, giving it the ability to describe photos, diagrams, and other snapshots using the Grok-2 AI model which powers the AI chatbot and its Flux AI image creation. The feature brings Grok to parity with ChatGPT, Gemini, and other rivals. If you subscribe to X's subscription plans, you can try it out now by clicking on a button in an image post within X and asking Grok questions about the image or just for a straight descriptive analysis. In tandem with the new feature, Grok showed off a new benchmark called RealWorldQA that is supposed to show how well a model can describe a real-world image, including the space between objects. The company claims RealWorldQA shows Grok to be as good or better than its rivals at explaining images even though it's still in development. You can see an example below of how it works, shared on X by Elon Musk. As the screenshot illustrates, Grok is capable of breaking down a complex multi-stage image and explaining what happens in it. It can then extrapolate the humor of the joke, though, as is almost always the case, explaining the joke makes it much less funny. Still, it's a sign that xAI is not done with putting out new features for Grok, especially multimodal tools. This could be a step toward Grok being able to explain audio and video content the same way it does with visuals. One element not mentioned is how the visual analysis by Grok might portray the freewheeling image creation by the AI chatbot that seems to have little or no compunction about copyright issues. It's something that users making images of Mario faced when Nintendo's copyright infringement hunter Tracer went after them for infringement. Whether an AI image of Mario or any other intellectual property would be described as such or in more generic terms would be interesting to discover. xAI's owner being who he is, there's also very obvious potential for the feature in other Musk-owned technology companies. Tesla's semi-autonomous driving would certainly benefit from being able to identify people and objects around it and how they are spaced apart. The same goes for the long-promised humanoid robots Tesla's had under development for the last few years.

Grok Can Now Process, Answer Queries About Images With New Feature

Elon Musk hinted that file uploading feature might be added soon Elon Musk, the founder of the artificial intelligence (AI) company xAI, announced a new feature for Grok on Monday. The in-house AI chatbot is now getting image understanding capability that allows it to process and analyse the content in an image. Users can now upload an image and ask the AI questions based on it. Notably, xAI released the Grok-2 AI model in August. At the time, the company announced that the AI model would soon support different modalities. In a post on X (formerly known as Twitter), the official handle of Grok announced the new image understanding capability for the AI chatbot. Image understanding, also known as computer vision, allows an AI system to see and process visual data within an image or a video. Currently, this capability is only available for static images. Musk also posted about the new feature, highlighting that the AI chatbot can run a deeper analysis of the image and even explain the meaning of a visual joke. Sharing an example, the billionaire asked Grok to explain a joke in an image. The AI was able to explain the joke's premise, the twist, and the visual gag in it. However, computer vision is not a new capability for AI systems, and almost every major AI model offers this feature including Gemini, ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude, and more. An X user highlighted this and raised concerns that there are many basic features still lacking in Grok. In a comment to Musk's post, the user said that the AI chatbot still does not have file uploading and image generation capability. The billionaire entrepreneur replied, "Not for long. We are getting done in months what took everyone else years." These capabilities could be added to Grok in the near future. In August, xAI released Grok-2 and Grok-2 Mini AI models, as an upgrade to the pilot version of the large language model (LLM). Both models are available in the Grok chatbot to X Premium and X Premium+ users. The company claimed that it outperformed both the Claude 2.5 Sonnet and GPT-4 Turbo AI models.