Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company xAI has announced a major update to its AI assistant, Grok. The latest version incorporates visual capabilities, allowing Grok to analyze and understand images in addition to its existing text capabilities.

Grok can already generate images using Black Forest Labs' Flux model and was the last of the major AI chat products not to include image analysis, also known as AI Vision.

With the introduction of this vision capability, Grok will be able to analyze images linked to posts on the X platform, interpret visual content such as documents, diagrams, and photos, and better describe content by understanding spatial relationships within images.

This could be used to come up with recipe ideas from photos of ingredients, locate landmarks in photos shared on X, or explain the results of a graph. The last part would be especially useful on a news-heavy platform like Grok.

Users will soon notice a new button on posts containing images on the X platform. Clicking on it will send the image to Grok, where the user can ask questions or request an analysis of the visual content. It could also help explain the image for those with vision problems.

Although official benchmarks are not yet available, xAI says that Grok's visual capabilities are comparable to established models from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. To this end, the company has introduced a new benchmark, RealWorldQA, designed to assess a model's proficiency in understanding and reasoning about the physical world through images.

The announcement provoked mixed reactions from the AI community and users, with some enthusiastic about the speed of Grok's progress, while others remained cautious, questioning its performance against existing AI models.

xAI, owned by Elon Musk, is building a 200,000 GPU data center for the sole purpose of training future versions of Grok. There is no doubt that something big will come out of this model in the future.

Especially as it relates to visual capabilities, these could find their way to robots. Musk owns Tesla, and Tesla also has a robotics division. In the future, video and voice analysis could also come out of Grok. This is because these are features that have already been introduced in Gemini and ChatGPT.

While this update is a notable advancement for Grok, it is clear that this model is still in its infancy compared to mature AI models such as Gemini and ChatGPT. As with all rapidly evolving AI technologies, we will need to monitor both the upgraded capabilities and ethical considerations of these developments in the coming months.