Grok vs. Vicuna

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 Koala, Vicuna is one of many descendants of the Meta LLaMA model trained on dialogue data collected from the ShareGPT website. According to the authors, Vicuna achieves more than 90% of ChatGPT's quality in user preference tests, while vastly outperforming Alpaca. As of May 2023, Vicuna seems to be the heir apparent of the instruct-finetuned LLaMA model family, though it is also restricted from commercial use.

Initial release: 2023-03-30

Reference

https://vicuna.lmsys.org/

Further Reading

• https://lmsys.org/blog/2023-03-30-vicuna/