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Elon Musk has been in the news lately for his political activities and rocket launches, but still… Owner/manager of 6 companies He started by moving his artificial intelligence startup, xAI, forward.
Today, Musk announced through his social network announced that it is now possible to build.
Musk posted a simple message on his X account: “@xAI API is now live!” On Monday, October 21, at approximately 12:00 PM ET, a reply post followed: Link to xAI API sign-on page.
According to xAI’s documentation, its API gives developers access to xAI’s latest multimodal language models, Grok-2 and Grok-2 mini. This also includes the ability to generate forgiving images using Black Forest Labs’ Flux.1 diffusion model.
However, in limited testing, we only had access to a model named “Grok-beta”. Of note, the entire API website is labeled “Public Beta” at the top, so xAI developers and engineers will likely iron out various bugs and add new features in the coming days. It will be.
Positioning and pricing
The release of the xAI API is beneficial to Musk’s larger quest to confront xAI and his previous company, OpenAI (which he co-founded and left), which also offers an API.
The xAI API provides a web-based console for creating API keys, exploring endpoints, and integrating models into your applications.
It supports REST, gRPC, and SDKs, and is compatible with other AI services such as OpenAI, allowing for smooth integration with existing systems.
I signed up to see pricing and spent $25 on prepaid credits to see if I could access the model, but at the time of publishing this article I only had access to “grok-beta.”
131,072 context tokens are provided, and the API can process 1 request per second (RPS) and up to 10 requests per minute (RPM).
For now, OpenAI pricing Its AI models are significantly cheaper than xAI, with GPT-4o developer costs of $2.50 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, compared to Grok’s developer costs of $5/million per million input tokens. $15 per output (although OpenAI’s new inference model o1 is more expensive; both $15/$60).
• Generate text and code: Grok models can handle tasks such as generating code, summarizing content, and performing data extraction. This flexibility makes it valuable for a wide range of use cases such as software development and data analysis.
• vision: The model can analyze and generate images, extending its use beyond text-based tasks to multimedia and visual content generation.
• Function call: The xAI API allows your models to interact with external tools such as APIs and databases. This enables real-world tasks such as booking flights, accessing IoT devices (like unlocking your Tesla), and retrieving live data from websites.
New development features
xAI founding member Toby Pohlen shared additional details about building the new xAI API. thread Today on Social Network X, I wrote: “Creating a scalable API from scratch was a lot of work. Here are some of my favorite engineering highlights.”
As he explained, xAI’s API includes:
• Usage Explorer: The xAI console includes a usage explorer that tracks API usage, similar to those found on major cloud provider platforms, giving developers insight into resource usage and costs. Masu.
• Simplified team management: Small businesses can bind email domains to teams, making it easier to manage users and teams within the platform.
• Enhanced security: Users can view all active sessions and log out of unrecognized devices in the Accounts app. In addition, users will be notified via email whenever their account is accessed from a new IP address.
The platform also supports two-factor authentication with TouchID, security keys (such as Yubikey), and authenticator apps.
How to get started with xAI’s new API
To start using the xAI API, developers must sign up via the xAI console, join a team, and configure billing.
Each team is assigned its own API key and billing settings, allowing businesses to track costs and effectively manage resources.
As Pohlen highlighted, the ability to bind email domains to teams streamlines team management for small businesses.
It remains to be seen whether developers will flock to xAI’s API and adopt it alongside or instead of other attractive alternatives of the next-generation AI era, such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Microsoft. . But at least xAI is giving them a choice.
