The AI startup launched its first stand-alone consumer app, as the company tries to catch up with more established players such as OpenAI and Google in the generative AI race.

Elon Musk's generative artificial intelligence startup xAI officially launched a standalone app of its Grok chatbot on the App Store this week. The rollout of the app, which has been quiet, is essentially the same version of the chatbot that is available to X Premium and Premium+ users.

Elon Musk’s X (formerly known as Twitter) has a built-in chatbot called Grok. xAI is an artificial intelligence company (AI) company founded by Musk in early 2023, about a year after he bought Twitter. Both X and xAI are privately held companies. Grok started as a chatbot within X. Grok 2 was made available for free on X in December.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that Grok chatbot, created by his AI startup xAI, is going to be integrated into Tesla vehicles "soon."

Musk has been using this distribution channel since xAI launched its first version of the Grok large language model, adding features like trending story summaries and AI-generated questions on posts as well as releasing the Grok chatbot (initially) to X users exclusively.