If you’re on Twitter (aka X), you can’t go more than a few posts without seeing someone tagging Grok for input. Outside of the platform, you’re unlikely to see Grok anywhere. According to data from the analysis firm AppMagic, downloads of Grok have fallen significantly in recent months, and a shockingly small share of people are actually paying for the anti-woke AI.
The data comes via the Wall Street Journal, which has a couple of brutal stats and one damning quote that reveals the state of the Grok chatbot, Elon Musk’s baby, best known for calling itself MechaHitler and fueling a flood of non-consensual nude images. Downloads of Grok’s standalone app have reportedly dropped from 20 million in January to just 8.3 million in April, a drop of nearly 60%. (Let’s try not to read into the fact that the app saw its peak in downloads at the time UndressGate was happening, lest we end up with an even lower opinion of humanity.)
It also cited a survey conducted by Recon Analytics, which asked more than 260,000 Americans about their AI usage. Just 0.174% of respondents said they are paying for Grok. By comparison, 6% say they are shelling out monthly for ChatGPT.
One last nail in the coffin: An engineer the Journal talked to described AI options by saying, “OpenAI is Coke, Anthropic is Pepsi, and Grok is RC Cola.” Of course, that analogy doesn’t quite map cleanly. Imagine if you had to pay $30 a month to drink RC.
The failure of Grok to take hold among professionals (but likely getting a boost from pervs) might be part of the reason that xAI’s latest pitch is that it’s shifting from achieving AGI to putting data centers on the moon. The company recently announced that it was renting out the processing power of its massive Colossus data center to Anthropic, despite Musk’s many attacks on the company that he calls “evil.” Now it’s starting to explore putting similar clusters of compute into space.
On Tuesday, the Journal reported that SpaceX (now the parent company of xAI) is currently in talks with Google to send data centers into orbit. It’s an idea that Musk has been obsessed with lately, and it seems to be the big hook for a potential profit center as SpaceX heads toward an initial public offering. Now the company has a legitimate partner in the project, though it seems like it’s probably a pretty low-risk proposition for Google. Either SpaceX figures out low-earth orbit data centers (a possibility that experts are pretty dubious about) and Google gets to make use of them, or SpaceX fails, and Google keeps operating its terrestrial servers.
Regardless, it seems like Musk has found his “full-autonomous driving” for SpaceX—a promise that he might never actually make good on, but can roll out at every earnings report to keep investors happy about the theoretical profits just over the horizon. Pay no mind to the red in the ledger.
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