# Grok 2

> xAI's 2024 flagship — a 270B mixture-of-experts model that added vision and image generation, later open-weighted.

- Maker: xAI (Grok)
- Line: Grok (flagship)
- Canonical page: https://ai-tldr.dev/models/grok-2/
- Updated: 2026-06-18

## In short

Grok 2 is xAI's flagship large language model from 2024, released in beta on August 13 and broadly to X Premium and Premium+ subscribers around August 20, 2024. It shipped alongside a lighter Grok 2 mini and was xAI's first model to add vision and, on X, image generation (initially via Black Forest Labs' FLUX.1).

## Facts

| Fact | Value | Source |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Context window | 131K | [1] |
| Input price | $2.00 per million tokens | [2] |
| Output price | $10.00 per million tokens | [2] |
| Licence | Grok 2 Community License Agreement (source-available) · open weights | [1] |
| Released | 20 August 2024 | [3] |
| Parameters | 270B total · 115B active (mixture-of-experts) | [1] |

## Sources

1. [xai-org/grok-2 — open weights on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/xai-org/grok-2)
2. [Grok 2 1212 on OpenRouter (pricing & context)](https://openrouter.ai/x-ai/grok-2-1212)
3. [Grok-2 Beta Release — xAI announcement](https://x.ai/news/grok-2)

## Overview

Grok 2 is xAI's flagship large language model from 2024, released in beta on August 13 and broadly to X Premium and Premium+ subscribers around August 20, 2024. It shipped alongside a lighter Grok 2 mini and was xAI's first model to add vision and, on X, image generation (initially via Black Forest Labs' FLUX.1). An early checkpoint tested anonymously as "sus-column-r" on the LMSYS Chatbot Arena leaderboard, where xAI said it outranked Claude 3.5 Sonnet and GPT-4-Turbo by Elo at the time.

On xAI's published academic benchmarks, Grok 2 scored 87.5% on MMLU, 75.5% on MMLU-Pro, 56.0% on GPQA, 76.1% on MATH and 88.4% on HumanEval, plus strong multimodal results of 66.1% on MMMU, 69.0% on MathVista and 93.6% on DocVQA. In December 2024 xAI brought the line to its enterprise API as grok-2-1212 (and grok-2-vision-1212) with a 131,072-token context window, priced at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens.

Grok 2 is a sparse mixture-of-experts transformer: roughly 270 billion total parameters across 64 blocks with 8 experts, of which 2 activate per token, for about 115 billion active parameters. In August 2025 xAI open-sourced the Grok 2.5 weights on Hugging Face under the source-available Grok 2 Community License Agreement (which forbids using the model to train competing models). Grok 2 is now a legacy model, superseded by Grok 3 and the Grok 4 family.

## Benchmarks

- MMLU: 87.5% ([source](https://x.ai/news/grok-2))
- MMLU-Pro: 75.5% ([source](https://x.ai/news/grok-2))
- GPQA: 56% ([source](https://x.ai/news/grok-2))
- MATH: 76.1% ([source](https://x.ai/news/grok-2))
- HumanEval: 88.4% ([source](https://x.ai/news/grok-2))
- MMMU: 66.1% ([source](https://x.ai/news/grok-2))
- MathVista: 69% ([source](https://x.ai/news/grok-2))
- DocVQA: 93.6% ([source](https://x.ai/news/grok-2))

## Pricing

- Input: $2.00 per million tokens
- Output: $10.00 per million tokens

grok-2-1212 / grok-2-vision-1212 enterprise API pricing, announced December 2024.

Source: https://openrouter.ai/x-ai/grok-2-1212

## Strengths

- Strong 2024-era general knowledge — 87.5% MMLU and 75.5% MMLU-Pro (state-of-the-art on MMLU-Pro at release)
- Capable coding for its generation — 88.4% on HumanEval
- Excellent document and visual reasoning — 93.6% DocVQA and 69.0% MathVista
- Mixture-of-experts design activates only ~115B of 270B parameters per token
- Weights later open-sourced (as Grok 2.5) under a source-available license for self-hosting

## Best for

- General-purpose chat and reasoning assistants (Grok on X)
- Document understanding and visual question answering
- Coding help and code generation
- Multilingual instruction-following via the grok-2-1212 API
- Self-hosted experimentation with the open-sourced Grok 2.5 weights

## How to access

- [xAI API](https://docs.x.ai/developers/models) — model id `grok-2-1212`
- [OpenRouter](https://openrouter.ai/x-ai/grok-2-1212) — model id `x-ai/grok-2-1212`

## Grok (flagship) versions

- [Grok 4.3](https://ai-tldr.dev/models/grok-4-3/) (30 April 2026)
- [Grok 4.20](https://ai-tldr.dev/models/grok-4-20/) (March 2026)
- [Grok 4.1](https://ai-tldr.dev/models/grok-4-1/) (17 November 2025)
- [Grok 4](https://ai-tldr.dev/models/grok-4/) (9 July 2025)
- [Grok 3](https://ai-tldr.dev/models/grok-3/) (17 February 2025)
- Grok 2 (20 August 2024) — this page
- [Grok 1.5](https://ai-tldr.dev/models/grok-1-5/) (15 May 2024)
- [Grok 1](https://ai-tldr.dev/models/grok-1/) (3 November 2023)

## FAQ

### When was Grok 2 released?

xAI announced Grok 2 (and Grok 2 mini) in beta on August 13, 2024 and rolled it out to X Premium and Premium+ users around August 20, 2024. The grok-2-1212 API version followed in December 2024.

### How big is Grok 2 and what is its architecture?

Grok 2 is a sparse mixture-of-experts transformer with roughly 270 billion total parameters across 64 blocks and 8 experts; only 2 experts fire per token, so about 115 billion parameters are active per forward pass.

### How much does the Grok 2 API cost?

When xAI added grok-2-1212 and grok-2-vision-1212 to its enterprise API in December 2024, pricing was $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, with a 131,072-token context window.

### Are Grok 2's weights open?

Yes. In August 2025 xAI open-sourced the Grok 2.5 weights on Hugging Face under the source-available Grok 2 Community License Agreement, which permits use and modification but forbids training competing models with it.

## Links

- [Grok-2 Beta Release — xAI announcement](https://x.ai/news/grok-2)
- [xai-org/grok-2 — open weights on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/xai-org/grok-2)
- [Grok 2 1212 on OpenRouter (pricing & context)](https://openrouter.ai/x-ai/grok-2-1212)
- [xAI Models — API documentation](https://docs.x.ai/developers/models)
- [xAI's Grok can now generate images on X — TechCrunch](https://techcrunch.com/2024/08/13/xais-grok-can-now-generate-images-on-x/)

Source: AI/TLDR LLM registry, https://ai-tldr.dev/models/grok-2/