Musk Says Ads in Grok Will Fund xAI’s AI Costs

Advertisements could quickly seem in responses from Grok, the X-embedded AI chatbot, the platform’s proprietor Elon Musk mentioned in a livestreamed dialog with advertisers Wednesday night. Musk, who bought Twitter in 2022 earlier than altering its title to X and folding it into his AI startup xAI, mentioned he hoped promoting in Grok would generate funding for funding in AI improvement. Particularly, adverts might assist pay for GPUs, the expensive, high-processing-power chips that assist the event of enormous language fashions, he mentioned. “We’ll flip our consideration to, ‘How will we pay for these costly GPUs?’,” Musk mentioned.Musk then described his imaginative and prescient for a largely automated promoting course of for X. Advertisers might quickly, he advised, “be capable of add an advert” to Grok “and do nothing else,” letting the system help in every little thing from concentrating on to marketing campaign optimization. Such developments would observe a handful of latest rollouts of AI-enabled promoting options on X. “If a person’s making an attempt to unravel an issue [with Grok], then promoting the precise answer can be excellent at that time,” he mentioned.Musk additionally hinted at plans for an in-app checkout characteristic to allow purchases immediately inside X.The information arrives lower than a month after the departure of CEO Linda Yaccarino, who spent two years on the platform’s helm endeavoring to clean over relationships with advertisers after many reduce investments over model security considerations and extremist content material on X. Whereas Yaccarino was capable of win again some advert spend and develop a handful of content material offers, X’s advert revenues stay far under pre-Musk ranges. Beneath Musk, the corporate has pivoted extra into AI instruments and monetization, together with its chatbot Grok. On the decision, Musk claimed Grok is turning into “the neatest, most correct AI on the earth” regardless of the chatbot’s latest historical past of spreading misinformation, together with a bout of extremist and antisemitic content material final month that led to its temporary shutdown.