If you’re on Twitter (aka X), you can’t make more than a few posts without seeing someone tagging Grok for comments. Outside of the platform, you’re unlikely to see Grok anywhere. According to data from analytics firm AppMagic, Grok downloads have dropped significantly in recent months and a surprisingly small proportion of people are paying for the anti-wake AI.
The data arrives through the Wall Street Journalwhich has a couple of brutal statistics and a damning quote revealing the status of the chatbot Grok, the baby of Elon Musk, best known for calling himself MechaHitler and feeding a avalanche of non-consensual nude images. Downloads of Grok’s standalone app reportedly fell from 20 million in January to just 8.3 million in April, a drop of nearly 60%. (Let’s try not to interpret the fact that the app reached its peak downloads at the time UndressGate was happeninglest we end up with an even lower opinion of humanity).
He also cited a survey conducted by Recon Analytics, which asked more than 260,000 Americans about their use of AI. Only 0.174% of respondents stated that they pay for Grok. In comparison, 6% say they shell out for ChatGPT monthly.
One final nail in the coffin: One engineer the Journal spoke to described the AI options by saying, “OpenAI is Coca-Cola, Anthropic is Pepsi, and Grok is RC Cola.” Of course, that analogy is not entirely clear. Imagine if you had to pay $30 a month to drink RC.
The fact that Grok hasn’t managed to gain a foothold among the pros (but probably got a boost from the perverts) could be part of the reason xAI’s latest pitch is that it’s moving from achieving AGI to putting data centers on the moon. The company recently announced that it was rent the processing power of its massive Colossus data center to Anthropicdespite Musk’s numerous attacks on the company that he describes as “evil.” It is now beginning to explore the possibility of taking similar computing clusters into space.
On Tuesday, the Reported diary that SpaceX (now parent company of xAI) is currently in talks with Google to put data centers into orbit. It’s an idea that Musk has been obsessed with latelyand it appears 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 on the project, although it seems like it’s probably a low-risk proposition for Google. Or SpaceX discovers data centers in low Earth orbit (a possibility that Experts have quite a few doubts. about) and Google comes to use them, or SpaceX fails and Google continues to operate its ground servers.
Anyway, it looks like Musk has found his “fully autonomous driving” for SpaceX, a promise he may never keep, but which he may implement in every earnings report to keep investors happy with the theoretical earnings looming on the horizon. Don’t pay attention to the red on the ledger.
