How Elon Musk’s xAI is quietly taking over X

When Elon Musk launched his own AI startup, xAI, he promoted a key advantage over his competitors: access to the vast amount of data from his new social networking platform Twitter. By implementing new API fees on the network that he quickly changed X, Musk shut out other AI companies, keeping exclusive access for his models. And he started using X’s millions of users to test the results.

Musk has used this distribution channel since xAI launched its first version of the large Grok language model, adding characteristics such as trending history summaries and The questions generated by AI also on the posts like releasing the Grok chatbot (initially) to X users exclusively. Now, a bunch of new AI features have arrived. Peru discoveries of reverse engineer Nima Owji, the platform appears to be developing AI-powered post improvements, including a feature that allows Grok to modify your tweets. The chatbot It also seems to be adding location-based questionswhich allows users to ask about nearby things, such as shops.

xAI’s acquisition of the platform once known as Twitter is so unmistakable that even its brand has moved into X’s most visible real estate, with “xAI Grok” now commanding. prominent placement in the app’s main toolbar – a striking symbol of how Musk’s AI ambitions have come to dominate the social network. An xAI employee poked fun at his company’s expanding presence by sharing an image of X’s timeline overrun with the xAI logo.

xAI and X have perhaps the closest and most complex relationship of all of Musk’s companies. On paper, all xAI staffers are also X employees (but not the other way around); on top of access to the code base, they have company laptops from X and appear in the platform’s Workday HR software as X employees. After X left its flagship San Francisco HQ in September, the staffer moved to xAI HQ at the Stanford Research Park in Palo Alto. X offers xAI an instant pipeline to millions of users – much more efficient than building Grok’s audience from scratch. With xAI’s recently acquired Colossus cluster of 100,000 GPUs, implementing AI features in X has also become more technically feasible.

Musk has a history of creating intertwined and interdependent companies. Tesla and SpaceX share engineering expertise, for example, and after Musk bought Twitter, Tesla and Boring Company teams were a common sight in their offices. Musk’s supporters consider this a genius strategic advantage. Critics argue that the intricate relationships between their companies could create conflicts of interest, blur the lines of accountability, and expose companies to common vulnerabilities.

The relationship between X and xAI is complex, with varying levels of collaboration between their teams, sources say The Virgin. While Musk holds separate meetings with X and xAI engineers, the extent of day-to-day cooperation between the companies is unclear. For six months, xAI brought in ex-Meta and Discord product manager Nikita Bier to lead the implementation of AI on the X platform, including the addition of AI-generated questions to posts – in particular, Bier worked exclusively with xAI, rarely engaging with X’s team. (Before Grok’s release, X had considered building its own generative AI team under Musk’s cousin James). Some talent flows between companies – LinkedIn shows that xAI recruited two X engineers in September.

Funding raised for xAI is separate from what is raised for X, a setup that highlights their difference in value. xAI has seen meteoric growth, reported securing a $50 billion valuation and effectively doubling its value in just months. Meanwhile, X struggled to maintain value. Its most recent employee stock grants in October 2023 he valued the company at $19 billion, less than half of Musk’s $44 billion purchase price. X employees, who received RSUs at $45 per share, remained waiting more than a year for new stock grants while watching the valuation of its sister company rise. During xAI’s first round of funding, Musk said investors in X would own 25 percent of xAI, but which is not materialized for X employees who own X stock.

And while xAI benefits tremendously from its link to X, it is not clear whether users of X have benefited much from xAI. Not long after X launched the Grok-powered Stories feature, it started spewing garbage: made headlines that said Vice President Kamala Harris was shot after Donald Trump’s assassination attempt; wrong a bunch of shit about New York Mayor Eric Adams, saying he deployed 50,000 police officers to an earthquake; and erroneously asserted in an AI-generated headline “Iran hits Tel Aviv with heavy missiles.” (Grok, obviously, is not the only AI service with this problem.)

Despite the two companies’ unconventional entanglement, it’s unlikely that the two will completely merge anytime soon. The ideology behind xAI is the famous starry-eyed futurism that runs deep in the tech scene: open-source superintelligence, meteoric growth and SpaceX-level dominance in AI (or at least that’s what Musk threw at an xAI recruiting party a few months ago). It’s exactly the kind of bold moonshot that makes Silicon Valley’s most talented and deepest-pocketed lean forward in their chairs.

Meanwhile, at X, some staffers joke that they are no longer Musk’s favorite child. It is very clear in the product. His dream of doing it in one “everything app” failed to materializethe plans to launch the payment functions were stopped, the advertisers continue to flee from the controversies of Musk, and the beginners. like Bluesky and The threads threatens the dominance of X. The separation keeps Silicon Valley’s newest moonshot untethered from the messy reality of running a social network.

The platform Musk says he bought to protect free speech now appears to serve an entirely different purpose: a private testing ground for his AI ambitions. It’s an unconventional arrangement. But it seems to fit Musk perfectly.