SpaceX CEO Musk says Grok Bot costs are too high — Fortune
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said that the costs of maintaining the Grok Bot AI agent are unacceptably high compared with the service's revenue. He wrote this on the social network X in response to a user who said that their service usage limit had been exhausted four days earlier. As Fortune reports, the product is nevertheless demonstrating rapid growth.
800,000 paid users per week
SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said during the third-quarter earnings call that Grok Bot had 800,000 paid weekly users at the beginning of October. This is twice as many as in September. According to her, business use of the service is growing the fastest, for tasks in IT, sales, marketing, and engineering.
According to the publication, Grok Bot, launched in August, can perform multistep tasks on users' behalf: browse websites, prepare emails, and process invoices. Such AI agents require more computing resources than chatbots that answer individual queries. Musk also told analysts that users have begun using Grok more frequently as its capabilities improve.
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AI infrastructure costs
Fortune writes that SpaceX's Super Intelligence division generated $7.56 billion in revenue in the third quarter, compared with $813 million a year earlier. Its operating profit was $431 million, while in the same period of the previous year the division recorded an operating loss of $1.7 billion.
At the same time, according to SpaceX reporting data cited by the publication, the company's capital expenditures on AI amounted to $16.4 billion — more than twice the quarterly revenue of the Super Intelligence division and 84% of total capital expenditures of $19.6 billion. The division received a significant portion of its revenue growth from leasing data-center capacity to Anthropic and Google. Musk said that SpaceX seeks to split computing resources evenly between its own AI products and external customers, but demand for Grok Bot may change this ratio.
