From their site:
> The xAI API offers developers access to our large language model Grok-1 and our digital assistant Grok.
Maybe they just haven't updated the site to reflect Grok-2, which is significantly better.
Also, there is a straight-up crypto scammer under Elon's post - classic.
That's gRPC, which luckily isn't the kind of RPC that a lot of computer scientists don't like, just like the Object Oriented Programming in Rust isn't the kind of OOP that a lot of computer scientists don't like.
There's a client library to install, or setting it up yourself if you'd rather not install a client library. Installing a client library makes it feel RPC-like, but not moreso than a JSON client library.
I'm not sure what you think RPC is but RPC is just the paradigm of calling functions on a remote machine, passing arguments in a structured way, and getting a response back. Which is exactly what gRPC, JsonRPC and others all do. As opposed to resource-centric paradigms like REST, query languages, and non-realtime paradigms.
The main gripes against RPC is tight coupling, lack of a discovery mechanism and caching out of the box, and difficult in error handling and session management. All of which are also issues with gRPC.
gRPC offers no real benefits or drawbacks compared to other RPC implementations except that it is built onto of Protobuf.
It's like GraphQL with resolvers.
They have you imagine it's a procedure, but you can ignore that. You can have multiple responses, but they don't keep the analogy going for that. They don't suggest generators. https://grpc.io/docs/what-is-grpc/core-concepts/
Here's the golang gRPC Hello World where the interface clearly comes first rather than the procedure. HelloRequest / HelloReply is analogous to HTTP (except with HTTP it's officially a response and you usually see Response in the API but not always [1]). https://github.com/grpc/grpc-go/blob/master/examples/hellowo...
To me, this is a good thing. Good protocol, annoying name.