Elon Musk’s AI company, XAI, has officially launched its first image generation model, Aurora, after a brief appearance over the weekend. On December 7, some users noticed Aurora in the Grok interface, allowing them to generate images, but the tool disappeared within a few hours without any explanation. Now, a few days later, xAI has formally introduced Aurora to the public.

Aurora, the core image generation model of XAI, is described as an autoregressive mixture-of-experts (MOE) network trained on billions of images from the Internet. According to XAI, it is highly capable of creating photorealistic images based on user signals.

“We trained the model on billions of examples from the Internet, giving it a deep understanding of the world. As a result, it excels at photorealistic renderings and accurately following text instructions. Beyond text, for multimodal inputs into the model There’s also native support, the company said in a blogpost, “allowing it to draw inspiration from or directly edit user-supplied images.”

Aurora can generate a variety of content from text-based instructions, including text, logos, objects, and live images of people. It also has the ability to edit uploaded images.

While the editing tools are currently limited in terms of specifying the type or intensity of changes, users can simply tell them what changes they want, and Aurora will make those adjustments. For example, xAI demonstrated the model’s ability to add a hat to an animated image of an elephant, with more editing capabilities to be added to Grok in the future.

Aurora relies on an external model called Flux, developed by Black Forest Labs, for image generation. With Aurora, xAI now has its own in-house AI image generator, which is expected to offer more advanced features and customization options for users.

Aurora is now available in select countries through the Grok interface on the X platform (formerly Twitter), although specific locations were not disclosed. However, the company has announced plans for a global rollout within the next week. At the moment, Elon Musk has confirmed on his X platform that “Aurora is still in beta and will improve very rapidly.”