Aurora

Aurora is xAI's in-house text-to-image model, released December 9, 2024 after a brief botched rollout two days earlier. xAI describes it as an autoregressive mixture-of-experts network trained on billions of internet images, with native multimodal input — you can hand it a photo and describe the edit. It replaced Black Forest Labs' FLUX inside Grok, and it reached the xAI API on March 21, 2025. What it is famous for is photorealism plus permissiveness: TechCrunch, PetaPixel, and others documented it rendering public figures and copyrighted characters with few restrictions (it does refuse nudes). That makes it genuinely useful for photoreal work and genuinely controversial on the moderation front. Proprietary, no weights, and xAI has published no evals or technical details beyond the launch description.