Elon Musk’s xAI unveils new Grok-2 and Grok-2 mini models

Generative artificial intelligence startup xAI unveiled the newest versions of its Grok models, Grok-2 and Grok-2 mini, as the competition between AI companies rages on.

“We are excited to release an early preview of Grok-2, a significant step forward from our previous model Grok-1.5, featuring frontier capabilities in chat, coding, and reasoning,” xAI said in a blog post. “At the same time, we are introducing Grok-2 mini, a small but capable sibling of Grok-2. An early version of Grok-2 has been tested on the LMSYS leaderboard under the name ‘sus-column-r.’ At the time of this blog post, it is outperforming both Claude 3.5 Sonnet and GPT-4-Turbo.”

Claude 3.5 Sonnet is one of Anthropic’s models, while GPT-4 Turbo was created by OpenAI.

Google’s (GOOG) (GOOGL) Gemini generative artificial intelligence chatbot recently said OpenAI’s GPT-4 is the most advanced large language model, according to investment firm Baird.

Both Grok-2 and Grok-2 mini are available in beta testing on the X (formerly known as Twitter) social network, xAI added. The two models will also be available via the enterprise API later this month.

Earlier this week, OpenAI, which is backed by Microsoft (MSFT), unveiled a new version of its GPT-4o large language model, but provided little detail on it.

A number of investors have put money into xAI, which hit a $24B valuation in May after it raised $6B in a new fundraising round. Investors in that round included venture capital firms such as Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital. Other investors include Fidelity Management & Research Company, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal and Kingdom Holding, amongst others.

Ark Investment Management, led by Cathie Wood, also owns a stake in xAI.

Last month, Elon Musk said he would bring the idea of Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) investing $5B into xAI to the electric vehicle maker’s board of directors after the idea received nearly two-thirds of “yes” votes in an online poll.

Musk heads up xAI, along with X, Tesla and several other companies.