Elon Musk is making some X Premium and Premium+ features free to some users.
The billionaire businessman — who bought the microblogging site Twitter in 2022 for $44 billion and has since made several changes to the platform, including changing the name to X — has announced that users with more than 2,500 verified subscribers will benefit from Premium features without paying a penny. Furthermore, those with 5,000-plus followers will get to experience Premium+ features, including access to Grok, Musk’s ChatGPT rival.
“Going forward, all X accounts with over 2500 verified subscriber followers will get Premium features for free and accounts with over 5000 will get Premium+ for free,” he posted.
Earlier this week, Musk announced he was making xAI’s chatbot, Grok, available to X’s Premium subscribers “later this week.”
“Later this week, Grok will be enabled for all premium subscribers (not just premium+),” he posted to X alongside a video explaining how to start a conversation with Grok.
It costs $8 a month or $84 a year to upgrade to a Premium account.
The move comes a week after the company open-sourced Grok.
Musk stayed true to his word and made the weights and architecture of the AI chatbot public, though he warned that it’s not “fine-tuned” for applications such as dialogue.
“We are releasing the weights and architecture of our 314-billion parameter Mixture-of-Experts model, Grok-1,” read an update on the company’s website.
“This is the raw base model checkpoint from the Grok-1 pre-training phase, which concluded in October 2023. This means that the model is not fine-tuned for any specific application, such as dialogue. We are releasing the weights and the architecture under the Apache 2.0 license,” the update continued.
It essentially enables developers to modify the language model to build AI applications.
