As xAI reels from a mass exodus of cofounders, remains mired in numerous controversies, and loses ground to competitors like Anthropic, CEO Elon Musk has quietly made a small but significant change to how its flagship chatbot Grok functions.
Starting last week, Grok stopped taking questions that free users asked in posts on Musk’s social media site, X, where the chatbot is integrated. Instead, it now states that “Ask Grok” is only available to Premium and Premium+ subscribers, paid tiers that the site heavily pushes.
It’s another sign of desperation from Musk. For better or worse, “Ask Grok” became one of the most recognizable features of the website after his takeover. Twitter was no longer Twitter, and tweets were no longer tweets, but Grok was everywhere. Replies that read “Hey @Grok” and “@Grok is this true?” became a meme and mantra, even beyond the site, no doubt introducing many users to the chatbot.
And for Musk, who has an obsession with combatting narratives from mainstream media, the “Ask Grok” feature allowed his “maximum truth-seeking AI” to weigh in on all kinds of political issues and set the record in a manner aligned with his personal beliefs. (Sometimes this backfired, as evidenced in episodes like when Grok suddenly began spouting racist conspiracy theories about a supposed “white genocide” in South Africa, or when users discovered it would overtly praise its creator, leading the bot to make claims that he was a greater role model than Jesus Christ and a genius on par with Isaac Newton.)
In short, Musk has decided to limit what had become a cornerstone of the X experience under his tutelage to paid blue checkmarks. It could be an act of belt-tightening at the company, and it could also be a sign of Musk trying to rein in the notoriously uncouth chatbot; when in late December Grok began churning out a flood of nonconsensual AI-generated nudes of real people, including of minors, xAI’s initial response was to temporarily limit image generating features via Ask Grok to paid users only.
The timing of the change is noteworthy. Following xAI’s recent acquisition by Musk’s space company SpaceX, the aggrandized corporation is looking to go public at a staggering valuation of $1.25 trillion, in what would be the largest IPO in history. Ahead of that, Musk seems to be cleaning up xAI’s act. Last week, Musk said he would rebuild xAI “from the foundations up” after confessing that it “was not built right first time around.” Cofounders fled or were pushed out of the company in the flurry, with only three remaining after the dust had settled. Behind the scenes, Musk ordered another round of layoffs, according to the Financial Times, reportedly because of his frustration at the performance of its AI coding assistant. “Grok is currently behind in coding,” Musk admitted at a conference last week, per Business Insider.
Coding remains one of the main battlegrounds for AI companies as the tools have become popular with software engineers. With the long-term profitability of generative AI tools still being a big question mark, selling AI coding assistants to huge enterprise clients offers one of the few surefire ways of making money. Perhaps a freely available “Ask Grok” feature is a casualty of Musk’s renewed focus on the world of software development.
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