X (formerly Twitter) plans to show people ads on Grok, its artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot. The Elon Musk-led company is looking to increase its advertising revenue, which reportedly witnessed a drastic fall after the billionaire took the social media company private. Additionally, Musk also revealed that X will leverage its parent company xAI’s capabilities to improve targeted advertising. Days after it was launched, the Grok Imagine video and image generation service is temporarily available for free in the US.
Elon Musk Plans To Fund “Expensive” GPUs With Ad Revenue
In a Spaces discussion with advertisers on X, Musk made the revelation that the company plans to show people ads with Grok answers and suggestions, as part of the platform’s to monetise the AI chatbot’s capabilities. He said that xAI, X’s parent company, has been focused only on making the AI chatbot better, and it will now shift its attention to monetise its capabilities.
Musk also announced the launch of Grok Imagine, an AI image and video generation tool. The new tool is currently available for free in the US. The AI tool has been added to the Grok app, which can be downloaded via the App Store and Google Play Store.
Musk said that the company needs to pay for the “expensive” GPUs that power Grok. He also suggested that the ads could show up as suggestions when a user asks the AI chatbot a specific query. Unfortunately, he did not divulge further information regarding the monetisation strategy. Apart from this, he also said that X would use xAI’s technology to optimise and improve its algorithms to show targeted ads on the microblogging platform.
This is pertinent because the ad revenue of the social media platform has witnessed a drastic dip since Musk bought Twitter (as it was then called) in October 2022, taking the publicly traded company private, as per a recent report by Reuters. However, this might change soon as its ad sales are reportedly expected to grow 17.5 percent to $1.31 billion (roughly Rs. 11,490 crore).
