What Grok is
Grok is two things that share a name. It is the assistant people talk to on grok.com and inside X. It is also the model family that powers that assistant, plus Grok Build, Imagine, Voice, Grok Bot, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and the public API.
The company's stated mission is blunt: understand the universe. That is not a slogan pasted on a chatbot. It is the reason the training cluster is the size it is, and why Grok is wired into live search on the web and on X instead of pretending a training cutoff is the present.
House style
Grok was introduced in November 2023 as a model that would answer questions other systems refuse, with less sanctimony and more follow-through. The current line still carries that posture: useful first, witty when it helps, unwilling to flatten a contested fact into a press release.
It does not know what happened this morning unless search tools are on. The knowledge cutoff for Grok 4.6 is 1 February 2026. Realtime events require web search or X search.
What it is good at
Grok 4.6 is the default for almost everything that is not a dedicated media model.
- Code and agents. Long trajectories, tool use, and turning a vague product idea into a working first version.
- Knowledge work. Research, analysis, long documents, and office-shaped artifacts.
- Vision in, text out. It accepts images (JPEG or PNG, up to 20 MiB) mixed with text in any order.
- Live context. With search tools enabled, it can read the web and the X firehose.
Images, video, and speech are separate models in the same house. See How you meet it.
Where it runs
| Surface | What it is |
|---|---|
| grok.com | The consumer assistant |
| X | Native Grok inside the social network |
| Grok Build | Coding agent; 4.6 is the default |
| Cursor | Frontier coding model on all plans |
| API | grok-4.6 and the rest of the family |
| GitHub Copilot | Grok 4.6 as a selectable model |
| Gateways | OpenRouter, Vercel, Cloudflare |
The company behind it used to be called xAI. It is now SpaceXAI, a SpaceX subsidiary. The legal entity on the site footer is still X.AI LLC. The stack is documented here. The short version of this briefing is on Grok.