xAI, the artificial intelligence company founded by Elon Musk, unveiled a new application programming interface (API) on Wednesday, distinguishing itself with the introduction of image generation capabilities. This release marks a significant development for developers, following the launch of five APIs since November 2024, with a focus on enhancing user tools. The pricing structure for this new API is reportedly on the higher side, and currently, there is no option for users to customize the generated outputs.
xAI Unveils New API Featuring Image Generation
Prior to this latest release, xAI had provided four distinct AI models through its API, with two based on its initial Grok large language model (LLM) and the other two on Grok 2. While the company previously enabled image understanding, the capability to generate images through the API was not available.
This limitation may have stemmed from the fact that xAI outsourced its image generation features to its chat platform. Until late last year, image generation for Grok was managed by the AI startup Black Forest Labs. In December, however, xAI introduced Aurora, a new image generation model utilizing a mixture of experts (MoE) framework, facilitating an expansion of this technology to developers.
In its official documentation, xAI has now announced a new model named ‘grok-2-image-1212’, which includes the ability to generate images. The process is user-friendly; when a text prompt is provided, a chat model processes and clarifies the instruction before passing it to the image generation model to create the output.
Developers can generate up to 10 images per request by modifying specific parameters, though there is a cap of five requests per second to prevent overloads, after which an error message will be issued. The output is provided in JPEG format, with xAI reportedly setting a price of $0.07 (approximately Rs. 6) per image, according to a TechCrunch report.
This pricing is relatively high in comparison to other services, such as Black Forest Labs’ Flux API, which charges $0.05 (around Rs. 4) per image, and Google’s Imagen 3, priced at $0.03 (approximately Rs. 2.5) per image. However, it is worth noting that Ideogram’s pricing stands at $0.08 (about Rs. 7) per image.
Furthermore, xAI’s new API does not currently allow for output customization, meaning users cannot alter aspects such as image quality, size, or style. It is important to emphasize that while the API endpoint is compatible with the OpenAI SDK, it does not work with the Anthropic SDK.
