Yesterday, X began rolling out Grok, the “rebellious” AI chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s xAI startup, to Premium+ subscribers on X’s platform. Today, Musk says that Grok’s rollout to all U.S. Premium+ subscribers is now complete, but cautioned that the beta would face many issues, though it would be steadily improved. He also offered a timeframe for Grok reaching other markets beyond the U.S., noting that all English language users (who subscribe to Premium+) would gain access to Grok in “about a week or so.”
Japanese users, which is X’s second-largest user base, would then follow with the aim of bringing Grok to “hopefully” all languages by “early 2024,” the X owner said.
Grok AI (beta) is now rolled out to all 𝕏 Premium+ subscribers in the US.
There will be many issues at first, but expect rapid improvement almost every day. Your feedback is much appreciated.
Will expand to all English language users in about a week or so. Japanese is next…
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 8, 2023
Of course, Musk’s timeframes for when things will happen don’t always come to pass — just ask any longtime Tesla watcher who spent time waiting on full self-driving (FSD). However, with Grok, Musk has only been a little behind in terms of his launch estimates. On November 22nd, for instance, Musk said that xAI’s Grok would launch to Premium+ subscribers “next week,” which would have been the week of Nov. 3-Dec.5, but the chatbot actually launched this week instead, on Dec. 7.
Whether or not the chatbot is a success in driving subscription revenue for X still remains to be seen. For now, Grok is only part of X’s top-tier subscription offering — the $16 per month Premium+. That’s much pricier than X’s Basic ($3/mo) and Premium ($8/mo) options, and it’s not clear it will appeal to casual AI dabblers who can use rival chatbots like ChatGPT or Google’s Bard for free.
The Premium+ subscription comes with access to other features to broaden its appeal, including the benefit of seeing no advertisements in the For You and Following timelines on X. Premium+ users also have their replies boosted the most, in addition to all of Premium’s features like ads revenue sharing for creators, ID verification, a verified checkmark, access to Media Studio, and more.
But so far, subscriptions haven’t driven the majority of X, formerly Twitter’s revenue — advertising has.
Yet now, it’s unclear what X’s ad-supported future may look like as Musk has been alienating X’s advertisers — even telling them to “fuck yourself” for leaving X over concerns of antisemitic content on the site. For X to be sustainable, it may need a larger number of users to subscribe to Premium+ for Grok to help shore up the loss of ad dollars as brands like Apple, Disney, IBM, Paramount, Walmart, and others flee the platform.
Of note, X had its largest-ever month for subscription revenue in November, pulling in $6.2 million in net revenue, after app store fees, according to one estimate by app intelligence provider Apptopia. However, that’s still less than a third of what Snapchat made for its own in-app subscription, which topped $20 million for the first time last month.
In other words, there’s still plenty of room for X to grow subscribers, given it reportedly has more than 500 million monthly active users. Whether or not it can, of course, is another story.