How Elon Musk’s xAI is quietly taking over X

When Elon Musk founded his own artificial intelligence startup, xAI, he touted a key competitive advantage: access to a enormous trove of data from newly acquired social media platform Twitter. By implementing recent API fees on the network, which he quickly renamed X, Musk blocked other artificial intelligence companies while retaining exclusive access to his own models. He started using millions of X users to test the results.

Musk has been using this distribution channel since xAI released the first version of the large-language Grok model, he added features like popular story summaries and AI-generated questions in posts as well as the release of the Grok chatbot (initially) exclusively for X users. Lots of recent AI features coming now. According to arrangements reverse engineered by Nima Owja, the platform appears to be developing AI-powered post enhancements, including a feature that allows Grok to modify your tweets. Chatbot also seems to add location based queriesso users can ask questions about things nearby, such as grocery stores.

xAI’s takeover of the platform once known as Twitter is so clear that even its branding has crept into X’s most evident properties, with “xAI Grok” now dominating visible place on the main application toolbar — a striking symbol of how Musk’s artificial intelligence ambitions have come to dominate the social network. An xAI employee poked fun at his company’s growing presence by sharing an image of crossing the X timeline with the xAI logo.

XAI and X have perhaps the closest and most convoluted relationship of all of Musk’s companies. On paper, all xAI employees are also X employees (but not vice versa); In addition to access to the codebase, they have company laptops from X and appear in the platform’s Workday HR software as employees of . X offers xAI instant access to millions of users — much more capable than building a Grok audience from scratch. With xAI’s newly acquired 100,000 GPU Colossus cluster, implementing AI features in X has also become more technically feasible.

Musk has a history of building interconnected, interdependent companies. For example, Tesla and SpaceX share engineering expertise, and after Musk’s takeover of Twitter, teams from Tesla and the Tedious Company were a common sight in its offices. Musk’s supporters consider this a brilliant strategic advantage. Critics argue that the intricate relationships between his ventures can create conflicts of interest, blur lines of responsibility and expose the companies to shared vulnerabilities.

Sources say the relationship between X and xAI is convoluted and the level of cooperation between their teams varies Edge. While Musk holds separate meetings with both X and xAI engineers, the extent of day-to-day collaboration between the companies remains unclear. For six months, xAI has hired former Meta and Discord product leader Nikita Bier to lead its AI rollout on the X platform, including the addition of Post questions generated by artificial intelligence — Bier, in particular, worked exclusively with xAI, rarely collaborating with Team X. (Before releasing Grok, X was considering building his own generative AI team under Musk’s cousin, James). Some talent does flow between companies – LinkedIn shows that xAI hired two X engineers in September.

Funds raised for xAI are separate from those raised for X, highlighting the stark difference in the value of these companies. xAI has experienced rapid growth, apparently securing a $50 billion valuation and effectively doubling its value in just a few months. Meanwhile, X struggled to maintain value. The latest employee share 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 waited over a year for recent stock grants as they watched their sister company’s valuation soar. During xAI’s first round of funding, Musk said investors in X would do so own 25 percent xAI, but this did not materialize for X employees holding X shares.

And while xAI benefits greatly from the connection to X, it is not clear that X users benefit greatly from xAI. Not long after X introduced the Grok-powered Stories feature, he started spewing garbage: this created headlines that claimed Vice President Kamala Harris was shot after attempting to assassinate Donald Trump; I misunderstood a lot of shitty posts about Fresh York Mayor Eric Adams saying he sent 50,000 police officers to the earthquake; AND he wrongly claimed in the AI-generated headline “Iran hits Tel Aviv with heavy missiles.” (Of course, Grok isn’t the only AI service that has this problem.)