Elon Musk's AI company, xAI, has taken a significant leap forward with its Grok AI model, adding image understanding capabilities to its repertoire. This update allows paid users on Musk's social platform, X, to upload images and ask the AI questions about them.

The news was announced by an xAI employee and the official @grok handle on X, with Musk himself chiming in to highlight the model's ability to even explain the meaning of a joke using the new feature. While Musk acknowledged that the functionality is still in its early stages, he hinted that it will "rapidly improve" over time.

This development builds upon the release of the Grok-2 model in August, which introduced image generation capabilities using the FLUX.1 model by Black Forest Labs. xAI had previously announced plans to add multimodal understanding to Grok on X and via its developer API, and this update marks a significant step towards achieving that goal.

Moreover, Musk has hinted that document understanding may be on the horizon, responding to a user's criticism about the model's inability to handle certain file formats like PDFs with a confident "not for long." The billionaire entrepreneur claimed that xAI is achieving in months what has taken others years to accomplish.

The update is part of a broader effort by X to enhance its AI chatbot and premium user tiers, making the platform more attractive to users. Earlier this month, X rolled out a new tool called Radar for Premium+ subscribers, allowing them to track real-time trends and gain insights into conversations.

As xAI continues to push the boundaries of AI capabilities, the implications for the tech and startup community are significant, with potential applications in fields like computer vision, natural language processing, and more.