Shortly after screenshots emerged showing xAI’s chatbot Grok appearing on X’s web app, X owner Elon Musk confirmed that Grok could be available to the entire company’s Premium+ subscribers sometime “next week.” While Musk’s pronouncements about time frames for product deliveries haven’t all the time held up, code developments in X’s own app revealed that Grok integration was already underway.

This week, app researcher Nima Owji shared screenshots showing how Grok had been added to X’s web app, noting that its URL could be twitter.com/i/grok. In a single screenshot, users who weren’t yet Premium+ subscribers could be invited to upgrade to achieve access to Grok. One other showed an “Ask Grok” text entry box for communicating with the AI chatbot. The features weren’t public-facing on the time of his discovery, nevertheless, but suggested that Grok’s rollout was nearing.

First released on November 4 to pick testers, Grok is Musk’s answer to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, Anthropic’s Claude and others, and will potentially gain a following as a part of X’s broader social platform.

As well as, xAI, the Musk-owned company behind Grok, guarantees that its chatbot can have more of a personality than rivals. It plans to reply to users’ questions “with a little bit of a wit” and is alleged to have a “rebellious streak,” in response to its website. The chatbot also plans to reply “spicy” questions which are rejected by other AI systems, the corporate has noted.

But personality alone won’t be key to Grok’s differentiation — it’ll even have access to real-time knowledge via the X platform, which could possibly be an interesting component, if not one which results in the best accuracy when it comes to its responses.

The addition could help juice sign-ups for X’s Premium subscription, which has yet to fare in addition to Musk hoped. The X owner revamped Twitter Blue to change into X Premium, promising paid verification amongst a number of other features, like increased exposure in replies, an edit button, the power to publish longer posts and videos, and a discount of ads.

Because of this, X recently announced it could split up its Premium service to incorporate three tiers: a $3 per 30 days Basic subscription which doesn’t remove ads, the present $8 per 30 days X Premium subscription and a $16 per 30 days Premium+ subscription which removes all of the ads within the For You and Following feeds, and introduces a Creator Hub where users can receives a commission to post and offer their fans subscriptions.

Grok is joining this higher-priced tier, which could encourage other X users, beyond creators, to enroll. That additional revenue is now more needed than ever as X is facing an advertiser exodus over concerns about antisemitic content on the platform, and Musk’s own behavior when it comes to amplifying antisemitic conspiracy theories.

Notably, Grok’s expected debut will follow per week of drama at rival AI company OpenAI where, over a matter of days, its CEO Sam Altman was ousted by the use of a board rebel, then joined by co-founder Greg Brockman, each of whom were announced as recent Microsoft hires, before negotiations saw Altman returning as CEO with a recent board in tow.

Though Grok’s arrival won’t have the boardroom drama of OpenAI, Altman has taken notice of Grok’s arrival, even dunking on the chatbot’s supposed comedic abilities, by posting a screenshot of a GPT that instructs it to “be a chatbot that answers questions with cringey boomer humor” and calling it Grok. Musk responded by calling ChatGPT-4 “GPT-Snore,” adding that “humor is clearly banned at OpenAI, identical to the numerous other subjects it censors.”

An early co-founder of OpenAI, Musk later walked away from the nonprofit and pulled his planned donation, after Altman and OpenAI’s other founders rejected a proposal that will have allowed Musk to take control of the corporate. The move resulted in a public rift between two key AI industry execs, leading Musk to later launch his own AI firm, xAI, with veterans from Google DeepMind, Google Research, OpenAI, Microsoft Research and Tesla.

Grok has since been trained on a knowledge base much like ChatGPT and Meta’s Llama 2, but will leverage real-time access to info on X, Musk has said. It’s going to also find a way to look the online for up-to-date information on some topics.