Elon Musk, the owner of the social media platform X—formerly known as Twitter—has announced that the company will expand access to its artificial intelligence chatbot, Grok, to all Premium subscribers within the week.
This announcement follows Musk’s xAI division open-sourcing Grok earlier in March, indicating a strategic shift to make advanced AI tools more accessible to a broader audience on the platform. Until now, Grok was an exclusive feature for the higher-priced Premium+ subscription tier. This move signals a potential bid to attract more users and directly compete with other prominent AI chatbots in the market, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude.
Addressing Declining Engagement and Revenue Challenges
The expansion of Grok access to Premium subscribers might also be an effort by X to bolster its subscription numbers amid reports of declining user engagement and a significant drop in advertising revenue.
Recent statistics from Sensor Tower, as reported by NBC News, highlight a worrying trend for X, with an 18% decrease in U.S. user activity year-over-year as of February and a 23% fall since Musk took over the platform. Additionally, the report points out that 75 of the top 100 U.S. advertisers on X as of October 2022 have ceased spending their advertising budget on the platform since Musk’s controversial “war on advertisers.”
Making Grok available to a wider subscriber base could potentially serve as a strategy to retain users contemplating a switch to other platforms. X is facing increasing competition from decentralized platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as Instagram’s Threads, which has quickly capitalized on Meta’s extensive resources to reach over 130 million monthly users by the end of the fourth quarter of 2023.
Musk’s announcement on X did not specify an exact date for when Grok would be made available to Premium subscribers, only stating that it would be enabled “later this week.”
Here are the available Grok’s subscription options:
| Subscription Tier | Monthly Cost | Annual Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Premium | $8 | $84 |
| Premium+ | $16 | $168 |
Grok distinguishes itself by engaging in a wider array of discussions, including topics that are typically avoided by other AI chatbots, such as conspiracy theories and controversial political ideas. Musk has described Grok’s responses as having a “rebellious streak,” potentially appealing to users interested in alternative viewpoints. Moreover, Grok possesses the unique capability of accessing real-time data from X, offering insights that rival chatbots cannot provide.
However, the value of this real-time data access feature under Musk’s leadership may be questioned as the platform struggles with user retention and decreased interest from advertisers, posing challenges to X’s overall viability and appeal in the competitive social media landscape.
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