The history of Grok, from Grok-1 to Grok 4.7

The Grok story in brief

Grok went from a sarcastic chatbot for paying X users in late 2023 to a family of frontier models used in coding tools, office add-ins and a bundled subscription in 2026. Along the way, its maker xAI merged with X, was bought by SpaceX and changed its name twice. Releases also sped up: one or two big models a year at first, then a new flagship roughly every month in the summer of 2026.

This page walks through that history year by year, using dates from xAI's announcements, its developer release notes and major news outlets. Where a date differs between sources, we give the month.

2023: a chatbot for X subscribers

Elon Musk incorporated xAI in March 2023 and announced it publicly that July, with a small founding team of researchers. The company's first product appeared on November 4, 2023: Grok, a chatbot with a deliberately rebellious, joking personality, inspired in tone by The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It ran on a model called Grok-1 and was open only to subscribers of X Premium+, X's most expensive tier, as an early-access beta.

From the start, Grok's selling point was its link to X. It could draw on posts from the platform, which made it quick to comment on trending topics, and that integration has defined the product ever since.

2024: open weights, vision and a free tier

2024 was the year Grok grew up and opened up:

• March 17: xAI published the weights of Grok-1, a mixture-of-experts model with 314 billion parameters, under the Apache 2.0 license, on GitHub and Hugging Face. It was one of the largest openly released models at the time.
• Late March: Grok-1.5 brought better reasoning and a context window of 128,000 tokens. Grok moved down to all X Premium subscribers, not just Premium+.
• April 12: a preview of Grok-1.5 Vision, the first Grok that could look at images.
• August 13–14: Grok-2 and the smaller Grok-2 mini launched, with image generation inside X. The loose content rules of that image feature drew criticism almost immediately.
• October and November: xAI opened its developer API in public beta.
• December: an in-house image model, Aurora, arrived, and on December 12 xAI announced a faster Grok-2 for every X user free of charge, with higher limits for Premium subscribers. Reports at the time described the free allowance as a handful of messages every couple of hours.

2025: Grok 3, Grok 4 and a wave of variants

In January 2025, Grok left X's shadow: a standalone iPhone app launched in the US on January 9, and grok.com became a web app in its own right, followed by an Android app. Then the models came quickly:

• February 17: Grok 3, with a Think mode that showed its reasoning and DeepSearch for research across the web. A smaller Grok 3 mini came with it. Grok 3 reached the API in April.
• March 28: xAI and X Corp combined into one company, X.AI Holdings.
• July 9: Grok 4 and Grok 4 Heavy, a multi-agent version sold on a premium plan. The same week, Grok's account on X posted antisemitic replies after a prompt change, one of several controversies that shaped how the public saw the product.
• August: Grok Imagine launched on August 4 for image and short-video generation. On August 23 xAI released the weights of Grok 2.5 on Hugging Face, and Musk said Grok 3 would be opened "in about 6 months". On August 28 came Grok Code Fast 1, a quick, cheap coding model.
• September 19: Grok 4 Fast, with a 2-million-token context window and both reasoning and non-reasoning modes, also offered to free users.
• November 17 and 19: Grok 4.1, tuned for more natural conversation, and Grok 4.1 Fast for developers, together with xAI's Agent Tools API for web search, X search and code execution.

2026: SpaceX and a new model almost every month

• February 2: SpaceX acquired xAI in an all-stock deal, making it a SpaceX subsidiary. Many of xAI's co-founders left over the following weeks.
• Mid-February: Grok 4.20 appeared on grok.com and in the apps as a beta, answering with a team of four agents.
• March 10: Grok 4.20 and Grok 4.20 Multi-Agent went live on the API. Grok 4.20 is the default model in our chat.
• April 30: Grok 4.3, a reasoning model with adjustable effort and a 1-million-token context, reached the API after a short subscriber beta. It is Grok 4.3 Thinking in our chat.
• May: Grok Build, a terminal coding agent, entered beta alongside an early-access coding model, Grok Build 0.1.
• June 16: Grok Imagine Video 1.5, with better motion and sound.
• July: xAI's rebrand to SpaceXAI was completed, and Grok 4.5 launched, trained alongside the team at Cursor, the code editor SpaceX agreed to buy. It later became the main model on grok.com, X and the apps.
• August 12: Grok 4.6, focused on long-running agents and visual work. Two days later SpaceX closed the Cursor acquisition.
• September 21: Grok 4.7, built on a new, larger base model, became the flagship for coding and knowledge work, first in Cursor, Grok Build and the API.
• October: the company began calling itself SpaceXSI, short for SpaceX Super Intelligence, while its legal name stayed SpaceXAI LLC. On October 13 it bundled Grok, Grok Bot, Cursor and X Premium into The X Subscription, with a limited free tier and paid tiers from $8 a month (plan prices as of October 2026). Reports from the start of the month showed Grok 4.7 arriving in the consumer apps.

Open weights: what you can actually download

Only two Grok models have public weights, both on xAI's Hugging Face page:

The Grok 2 license is not a standard open-source license: it allows commercial use under xAI's acceptable use policy, but forbids using the model to train other large models and asks for "Powered by xAI" credit. Every Grok model from Grok 3 onward, including all three in our chat, is closed.

Patterns worth noticing

• Developers first, then everyone. Since Grok 4.5, new models have usually reached Cursor and the API before grok.com and X.
• Fast and full versions. Most generations come in a quick, cheaper form and a slower, smarter one, and recent models let you set how hard they think.
• Bigger context windows. From 128,000 tokens in 2024 to between 500,000 and 2 million in 2026.
• Promises versus delivery. Dates slipped more than once, Grok 4.20 arrived months after it was first expected, and the Grok 3 weights never appeared.
• Close ties to X. The link to X gave Grok its identity, and also most of its controversies.
• A moving company name. xAI, X.AI Holdings, a SpaceX subsidiary, SpaceXAI and now SpaceXSI: the maker has changed shape almost every year, while the product name Grok and the grok- model ids stayed the same. That is why older articles, app listings and API docs can look as if they describe different companies.

Grok on Grok.Online today

Grok.Online is an independent site, not part of xAI, SpaceX or X. Our chat offers three models from this timeline through a cloud API: Grok 4.20 as the fast default, Grok 4.3 Thinking for reasoning, and Grok 4.7, the newest, for up to 10 messages a day. All three read images, but our chat cannot search the web or X with any of them, so their knowledge ends at their training cut-off. For the bigger picture of what Grok is, see What is Grok?, and for xAI's image and video tool, see Grok Imagine.