Grok really likes Elon Musk. Strange.
Credit: Jake Peterson
It’s 2025, which means every tech company needs to have its own AI bot, of course. X is no exception: Since late 2023, the site has offered a chatbot to its Premium subscribers, developed by sibling company xAI. While blue check accounts may enjoy their built-in AI solution, the vast majority of users with even a passing interest in AI will undoubtedly look towards other options, free or not, like ChatGPT or Gemini.
Perhaps that will change this year: In December, xAI announced a free version of Grok, specifically the newest Grok-2 model, available to anyone with an X account. Today, if you click on the Grok tab on X, you’ll be able to access Grok, much like any other chatbot you’ve used before. That’s fine and well for the curious among us still on X. But those who have fled for greener pastures haven’t been able to take advantage of this perk. That is, until now.
Grok is on iPhone, no X account required
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As of this week, Grok is now available as a free app on iOS—no strings attached. You don’t need an X account to use Grok, nor do you need to sign into any account at all. (Of course, you can connect your X account, or sign in via Apple, Google, or email.) Once you download the app, you can immediately ask Grok whatever it is you’d ask an AI chatbot. If you don’t sign in with X Premium, it seems the app is working off similar limitations to the free plan. That’s 10 requests every two hours, with three image analysis requests and four image generations per day.
Of course, now the question is, will people actually use Grok? It’s possible. As I write this, the app is the fourth most popular free app on the iOS App Store—one spot below ChatGPT, and well above Gemini at 49. (X is number 31, by the way.) However, I am a bit skeptical about its staying power. I obviously understand X and Elon Musk fans flocking to Grok, but most people who care about AI, I think, will stick with what they know (i.e., ChatGPT) unless Grok can do something different, better, or both.
I’ll admit, Grok is fast: I hadn’t tried it myself until now, and the speed at which it responds to text-based queries is impressive. That said, I haven’t spent too much time with it, so I can’t swear by how accurate the results are—and as a relative AI-skeptic, I’m not likely to use it much. However, the one area I see Grok having an advantage (and not necessarily in a good way) is its lack of filter. This is an X Corp product, after all, which means Grok doesn’t have some of the restrictions and limitations that other services have put into place to prevent abuse. When it comes to image generation, you can make some wild stuff with Grok.
When Lifehacker associate tech editor Michelle Ehrhardt tested out the Grok-2 beta in August, she was taken aback by some of the images she was able to get Grok to generate: violent, offensive, and weird. Even in some brief testing, I was able to make Grok infringe on copyrights without even having to trick it: With Google’s Imagen 3, for example, I was able to generate images of Mario by prompting the bot with vague workarounds, like “an Italian plumber wearing a red hat with the letter M.” Asking it to draw Mario wouldn’t work. Grok is the opposite: Try a workaround, and it spits out weird images of men wearing Mario’s clothes. Ask it to draw Mario, and it will—for better, or worse.
Mario was supposed to shoot the goomba, but I guess Grok had other plans.
Credit: Jake Peterson