Great New AI Updates: Grok 4 and ChatGPT 5

I had resisted trying Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot in part because of the controversy surrounding the man, including his creepy fascination with naming things X: SpaceX, xAI, Tesla Model X, and his social media platform X (formerly Twitter). Plus, a 4-year-old son named ​​X AE A-Xii. Seriously.

Still, Grok deserves your attention. It feels less techie than the other chatbots, with a well organized, more consumer-oriented interface.

The Grok app has two modes: Ask, which is a typical conversational chatbot, and Imagine, for generating images and videos. When you describe a video you want it to create, it first generates dozens of starter images. You choose the one you like best, and then select Make Video. It typically creates a 6-second video, including sound, in less than 30 seconds.

Grok has other features such as Voice Mode that lets you carry on a conversation with it; an image editor; and document analysis. And it even has AI companions that you can chat with.

But like Mr. Musk, it’s not without controversy, such as sometimes citing his personal opinions, offering up antisemetic comments, praising Hitler, and providing uncensored content. Some of these early issues have now been fixed.

The ease of making videos on Grok and other such services does have a downside. AI videos, sometimes referred to as “slop,” are flooding the internet. And some people are actually making money from this. The Washington Post wrote about a 31-year-old man in Idaho whose AI videos are bringing in $5,000 per month via TikTok's creator program. Most of the videos are fake street interviews.

Still, it has at least one major benefit: the chatbot itself decides which model to use when responding to you. I like this. With the previous ChatGPT-4o, depending on one’s need, such as software coding, one could choose among these options: GPT o3, GPT-o4-mini, GPT-o4-mini-high, GPT-4.1, and GPT-4.1-mini.

So now ChatGPT-5 decides which model to use, making the interface simpler—a big improvement.

A New Yorker article used the analogy of a car. GP-3 was like a sedan and GPT-4 like a sports car. But GPT-5 wasn’t obviously better, so as with a sports car, they improved it by souping it up.

But others aren’t so sure. Which is a bit of a relief.

Grok could use more work in this regard. But I like the more friendly interface and range of features and will definitely continue using it. And I’m glad it’s not named X.