xAI launches Grok API for developers, also has the ability to create images

AI company backed by Elon Musk xAI has launched a new application programming interface (API). This API is special because it provides the capability for creating images for developers for the first time. xAI has been courting developers for a long time and has launched five APIs to date since it launched its first API in November 2024, despite the relatively higher price of the new API and despite the company not offering users to edit the output right now.

Earlier, xAI introduced four AI models as APIs. Two of them were built using the initial version of Grok and two using Grok 2, though the former only supported understanding images while there was no support for generating images.

Previously, the task of image generation on the Grok chat platform was done by external AI startup Black Forest Labs, but in December 2024, xAI launched an image generation model called Aurora, which is based on the Mixture of Experts (MoE) network. Now it appears that xAI is making this model available to developers as well.

According to the documentation page of xAI, now a new API model called "grok-2-image-1212" has been listed, which has the ability of image generation. Its functioning is simple, after sending a text prompt, a chat model modifies the instruction to make it clear and then sends it to the image generation model, after which the output is prepared.

Features and Limitations of API:

• Developers can generate up to 10 images at a time.
• There is a limit of 5 requests per second, exceeding this will result in an error message.
• The output image will be provided in JPEG format.
• xAI will charge $0.07 (approximately ₹6) per image.