In a follow-up to Elon Musk’s March decision to open source the Grok large language model, the owner of X, previously known as Twitter, announced on Tuesday that X will soon make the Grok chatbot available to premium subscribers. Musk confirmed in a post on X that Premium subscribers, not only those on Premium+, will have access to Grok starting this week.
The change may indicate an intention to compete head-on with other well-known chatbots, such as Claude from Anthropic or ChatGPT from OpenAI. However, it may also suggest that X is attempting to increase its subscriber count. This announcement comes as statistics show that the X platform is losing users and is having trouble holding on to its current user base. Recent data from Sensor Tower, as reported by NBC News, shows that X usage in the US was down 23% since Musk’s acquisition and down 18% year-over-year as of February.
Seventy-five out of the top one hundred US advertisers on X stopped spending money on the platform as of October 2022, according to Sensor Tower, suggesting that Musk’s war on advertisers might have hurt the company’s revenue prospects.
By providing X users with access to an AI chatbot, they may be able to keep them from leaving to decentralized platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky or Instagram’s Threads, which, with the help of Meta’s resources, attained 130 million users per month by the end of 2023.
While Musk did mention that Grok “would be enabled” to all Premium subscribers “later this week,” he did not specify when exactly X users would be able to access it. The company offers X Premium, a mid-tier subscription, for $8/month (online) or $84/year. In the past, Grok could only be accessed by paying the excessive $168 annually or $16 monthly for Premium+ subscribers.
Since Grok’s chatbot will answer questions about conspiracies and other controversial political ideas, topics that other AI chatbots usually avoid, it may attract Musk’s followers and heavy X users. Additionally, it will respond to inquiries with “a rebellious streak,” as Musk put it. Notably, unlike its competitors, Grok has access to X data in real-time. It is possible that the data’s value may be decreasing during Musk’s ownership if X experiences a drop in users.
