In August, Elon Musk’s xAI promised to make Grok, the company’s flagship generative AI model powering a number of features on X, available via an API. Now, that API has arrived — albeit a bit bare-bones at the moment.
The xAI API only has one model available, “grok-beta,” priced at $5 per million input tokens (~750,000 words) or $15 per million output tokens. Tokens are subdivided bits of raw data, like the syllables “fan,” “tas,” and “tic” in the word “fantastic.”
It’s unclear which Grok model “grok-beta” might be; Grok 2 is the latest available on X. The documentation for the API refers to Grok 2 and Grok mini, a lightweight and more affordable version of Grok — so it could well be a technical issue.
The xAI API supports function calling, which lets the Grok models use external tools like databases and search engines. And, although they don’t appear to be live yet, the documentation hints at vision models capable of analyzing both text and images.