Free AI for the holidays? The first recent models of Google and Elon Musk xAI

Free technology lovers rejoice! Google and xAI have announced some very exciting updates to their free AI offerings, matching and expanding on OpenAI's recent democratization efforts.

OpenAI launched the latest in its battle for the hearts — and ultimately the wallets — of users with a massive “12 Days of OpenAI” campaign last week, releasing a series of powerful tools to the public. Highlights of the campaign include Sora, the company's state-of-the-art text-to-video generator, advanced reasoning model “OpenAI o1” and SearchGPT, a sophisticated web search integration.

Of these, both the search engine and the reasoning model are available to free users. Sora requires a ChatGPT Plus subscription.

Then Google made a series of announcements yesterday to show that it still has a lot to offer. A direct competitor to Sora, the Veo 2—the company's latest video generation AI model—has been announced, and users are already open to testing the model through Google's AI test kitchen.

“VEO creates videos with realistic motion and high-quality output up to 4K. Explore different styles and find your own with a wide range of camera controls,” says the company. Clips can be extended to several minutes in length, beating those made at 1080p resolution with shorter runtimes.

At Test Platform Labs, on December 16, Google also unveiled Whisk—an experimental visualization tool that focuses on using visual and image resources to produce visual effects. Unlike traditional text-to-image models, Whisk introduces a new “remix” approach where users can create new images with image references primarily from their existing photo galleries, reducing the need for detailed text queries.

The company's imaging capabilities have been further enhanced with the release of Imagen 3 – already available for free in the Google Gemini chatbot app. This new model brings improvements in detail rendering, stylistic contrast and ghosting reduction. It also has text generation capabilities, which Google's previous models lacked.

Also available for free is Gemini 2.0 Flash, an improved version of the Google Developer Console and a more polished and user-friendly version of the Gemini platform. Google released an advanced Research Assistant feature and gave the models the ability to run up to 1 million tokens on the developer console for free.

And some users have reported that there is also a trial version of Gemini 2.0 Advanced to try. “Advanced” is the most powerful model in the Gemini family, “Flash” is a small model focused on efficiency, and “Pro” is a medium-sized model.

Grok-2 for the masses

Unexpectedly, Elon Musk's xAI entered the fray, making his own effort to democratize access to advanced AI capabilities on the X Platform (formerly known as Twitter).

The company has released an upgraded version of the Grok-2 model with significant improvements in speed and capabilities. The new iteration runs three times faster than its predecessor while offering improved accuracy, instruction following and multi-language capabilities.

Also, last week, xAI started releasing Grok for free to all X Platform users. The integration extends beyond basic chat capabilities, introducing features such as web search with citations, allowing users to verify information and browse sources directly through the platform.

“Today we're excited to announce that we've started rolling out this new version of Gok-2 for free to all users on X. As always, Premium and Premium+ users will enjoy higher usage limits and will be the first to get any new capabilities in the future,” xAI said in a blog post.

The company has launched its own image generation model, Aurora, which is integrated into Grok's capabilities. The model offers lower image quality than Grok's previous integration with Flux, but still enough to provide photo-realistic images with less fast tracking, but less censoring.

To further support developers and enterprises, xAI announced significant price reductions for its API access, dropping rates to $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens.

Competition has fueled a rapid evolution in AI capabilities, with each company pushing the boundaries of what is possible while simultaneously making these tools more accessible. This democratization could lead to a new era of AI-powered innovation and productivity, as users gain access to tools that were previously only available to select developers or paying customers.

However, there's also a great option that some users don't think about: open source AI. There are enough models to compete with these tech giants, and they are available for free, fully customizable and surprisingly more transparent.

Genmo Mochi 1, Flux, Stable Diffusion, and Llama-3 are great options that can meet your needs and probably exceed expectations if you try them. And they are free to use too.

Edited by Andrew Hayward.