Grok vs. Koala

Overview

Grok is the proprietary model family available through xAI's products and API. Grok 4.5 is the current generation, focused on coding, agentic tasks, reasoning, and knowledge work.

xAI introduced Grok in November 2023 and released the weights for Grok-1 under Apache 2.0 in March 2024. Later generations are proprietary and available through Grok, X, and the xAI API. Grok 4.5, released in July 2026, is xAI's current flagship model for software engineering, tool-driven agents, complex reasoning, and professional knowledge work.

Initial release: 2023-11-05

Current generation: Grok 4.5

Reference

https://x.ai/news/grok-4-5

Further Reading

• https://github.com/xai-org/grok-1/tree/main
• https://x.ai/news/grok-4-5

Overview

Released alongside Vicuna, Koala is one of many descendants of the Meta LLaMA model trained on dialogue data collected from the web. On the developers' benchmarks, Koala outperforms its sibling Alpaca, though its adoption has been significantly less than that of its other sibling, Vicuna. Due to its use of LLaMA, only research use is permitted.

Initial release: 2023-04-03

Reference

https://bair.berkeley.edu/blog/2023/04/03/koala/

Further Reading