How Elon Musk’s xAI is quietly taking up X

When Elon Musk introduced his personal AI startup, xAI, he touted a key merit over his competition: get right of entry to to the huge trove of knowledge from his newly got social media platform Twitter. Through imposing new API charges at the community he briefly renamed X, Musk locked out different AI firms, keeping up unique get right of entry to for his personal fashions. And he started the use of X’s tens of millions of customers to check the consequences.

Musk has been the use of this distribution channel since xAI introduced its first model of the Grok huge language style, including features like trending tale summaries and AI-generated questions on posts as neatly as liberating the Grok chatbot (first of all) to X customers solely. Now, a slew of latest AI options is coming. In line with the findings of opposite engineer Nima Owji, the platform seems to be creating AI-powered submit improvements, together with a characteristic that we could Grok alter your tweets. The chatbot also appears to be adding location-based queries, letting customers ask about issues close by, like grocery shops.

xAI’s takeover of the platform as soon as referred to as Twitter is so unmistakable that even its branding has crept into X’s maximum visual actual property, with “xAI Grok” now commanding prominent placement in the app’s main toolbar — a placing image of ways Musk’s AI ambitions have come to dominate the social community. An xAI worker poked amusing at their corporate’s increasing presence, sharing a picture of X’s timeline overrun with the xAI emblem.

xAI and X have most likely the nearest and most intricate dating of all of Musk’s firms. On paper, all xAI staffers also are X staff (however no longer the opposite direction round); on most sensible of get right of entry to to the code base, they’ve corporate laptops from X and seem within the platform’s Workday HR device as X staff. After X vacated its flagship San Francisco HQ in September, the staffers moved into xAI HQ on the Stanford Analysis Park in Palo Alto. X provides xAI an fast pipeline to tens of millions of customers — way more environment friendly than construction Grok’s target audience from scratch. With xAI’s newly got Colossus cluster of 100,000 GPUs, deploying AI options throughout X has additionally develop into extra technically possible.

Musk has a historical past of making intertwined, interdependent firms. Tesla and SpaceX proportion engineering experience, for example, and after Musk got Twitter, Tesla and Dull Corporate groups have been a not unusual sight in its workplaces. Proponents of Musk imagine this a genius strategic merit. Critics argue that the intricate relationships between his ventures may create conflicts of passion, blur the traces of responsibility, and reveal the firms to shared vulnerabilities.

The connection between X and xAI is complicated, with various ranges of collaboration between their groups, resources inform The Verge. Whilst Musk holds separate conferences with each X and xAI engineers, the level of day by day cooperation between the firms stays unclear. For 6 months, xAI introduced on ex-Meta and Discord product chief Nikita Bier to steer AI implementation on X’s platform, together with the addition of AI-generated questions to posts — particularly, Bier labored solely with xAI, infrequently enticing with X’s staff. (Sooner than Grok’s free up, X had thought to be construction its personal generative AI staff below Musk’s cousin James). Some skill does float between the firms — LinkedIn displays xAI recruited two X engineers in September.

The investment raised for xAI is break free what’s raised for X, a setup that highlights their stark distinction in worth. xAI has observed meteoric enlargement, reportedly securing a $50 billion valuation and successfully doubling its value in mere months. In the meantime, X has struggled to deal with worth. Its most recent employee stock grants in October 2023 valued the corporate at $19 billion, lower than part of Musk’s $44 billion acquire value. X staff, who won RSUs at $45 according to proportion, had been waiting over a year for new stock grants whilst observing their sister corporate’s valuation jump. Right through xAI’s first investment spherical, Musk stated traders in X would own 25 percent of xAI, however that hasn’t materialized for X staff who personal X inventory.

And whilst xAI advantages greatly from its hyperlink to X, it’s unclear whether or not X customers have benefited a lot from xAI. Now not lengthy after X rolled out the Grok-powered Tales characteristic, it all started spitting out rubbish: it produced headlines that claimed Vice President Kamala Harris was once shot after the tried assassination of Donald Trump; misunderstood a bunch of shitposts about New York Mayor Eric Adams, pronouncing he deployed 50,000 cops to an earthquake; and erroneously claimed in an AI-generated headline “Iran Moves Tel Aviv with Heavy Missiles.” (Grok, clearly, isn’t the one AI provider with this problem.)

Regardless of the novel entangling of the 2 firms, it’s not going that the 2 will absolutely merge anytime quickly. The ideology in the back of xAI is the acquainted starry-eyed futurism that runs deep within the tech scene: open-source superintelligence, meteoric enlargement, and SpaceX-level dominance in AI (or, no less than, that’s what Musk pitched at an xAI recruiting party a couple of months in the past). It’s precisely the type of audacious moonshot that makes Silicon Valley’s most sensible skill and private wallet lean ahead of their chairs.

In the meantime, at X, some staffers funny story that they’re not Musk’s favourite kid. That a lot is obvious within the product. His dream of constructing it into an “the whole lot app” has failed to materialize, the plans to release fee options have stalled, advertisers proceed to escape from Musk’s controversies, and upstarts like Bluesky and Threads threaten X’s dominance. The separation assists in keeping Silicon Valley’s latest moonshot untethered from the messy fact of working a social community.

The platform Musk claims he purchased to offer protection to unfastened speech now turns out to serve a distinct function completely: a non-public checking out flooring for his AI ambitions. It’s an unconventional association. However it kind of feels to fit Musk completely.