Update December 11, 2025:
xAI has officially announced Aurora on its blog, confirming it as an entirely new model built from the ground up. This suggests the company may be moving away from its previous partnership with Black Forest Labs for the Flux image model.
According to xAI, Aurora was trained on "billions of examples from the internet, giving it a deep understanding of the world" and excels at converting text prompts into photorealistic results. The model supports both text and multimodal inputs, allowing direct image editing. X plans to add an editing feature for uploaded images in the near future.
The company says Aurora excels in areas where other image generators often struggle, including detailed renderings, text generation, logo creation, and realistic portraits of famous people.
Original article December 7, 2024
xAI's new Aurora model creates ultra-realistic AI images with Grok 2
xAI seems to be rolling out Aurora, a new image generation model for Grok 2. Early user reports suggest Aurora creates highly realistic images of real people, with some users sharing AI-generated photos of Sam Altman and Elon Musk that look remarkably close to actual photographs. It's not yet clear whether Aurora is built on a modified version of the existing Flux model or an entirely new image generation system from xAI. X staffer Chris Park calls it "brand new." What is clear is that xAI continues to push forward with increasingly realistic AI image generation capabilities, despite lingering concerns about the potential misuse of the technology to create misleading content.
