With ad revenue in decline, and development costs mounting, X is throwing the kitchen sink at its Grok AI chatbot, as it launches the latest version of the tool to paying users in the app.
X is now promoting Grok to the left-side function bar, with a bright blue "New" tag to draw in the attention.

The company has now rolled out Grok 2 to all users, meaning that image generation capabilities powered by Flux are now part of the platform - along with a range of functional upgrades to enhance the experience of using generative AI on X.

Quoting X: "???? Two new models will be available for Premium and Premium+ users: Grok-2 and Grok-2 mini.". Grok-2 is our flagship AI assistant capable of state-of-art text and vision understanding, augmented with real-time information directly from the ??? ???? platform. Grok-2 mini is our smaller but highly competent model that balances power and response quality. Rather than its predecessor, Grok-2 is more intuitive and, therefore, easy to steer and versatile to a wide variety of tasks: whether you are looking for answers, are co-writing, or solving coding tasks.

Indeed, xAI says that the latest Grok "outscores both Claude and GPT-4 on the LMSYS leaderboard by its cumulative Elo score", making it akin to, if not more superior to a number of tools in the market.

And now, X is looking to use Grok to pump X Premium sign-ups, in hopes this will help reduce their dependence on ad revenue, and get its business back on track.

Though X is in an arduous scenario on this front.

According to reports, X's total ad revenue has fallen by nearly 70% since Elon Musk had the reins over the platform in 2022. X is also losing users; the app has a dismal fall of 5 million actives in Europe over the last year, apart from the bans and fines the platform has been slapped with across different regions for its stance on denying to comply with government requests.

Although, the same period saw X's debt servicing costs, on loans Musk obtained to purchase the app, increase its financial burden.

Thus, on balance, X stands little chance, though xAI can be its only hope in this regard as Elon's pet AI project received $6 billion funding from investors back in May.
The project has received backing from Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who, increasingly interested in investments in AI projects, can provide it with a steady stream of capital for financing the project for some time yet.

Since xAI is a subsidiary of X and largely depends on the data from X for powering its systems, there may be a little scope for Musk to squeeze funds from one project to another, which will serve as a lifeline for X. Whether it works exactly this way or not remains unknown, but X might have alternative funding facilities outside of direct revenue streams.

But even that will eventually require X to stand on its own as a business possibility. Musk has said so himself, though it's hard to tell how his "free speech" approach to content moderation is ever going to jive with the demands of advertisers for brand safety and assurance.

Musk's vision for his X project was to maximize the amount of subscriptions through X Premium, which he hoped will eventually account for 50% of revenue for the platform. It is far from that as yet, but its advanced Grok model is the next lure to get more people to sign up, thus reducing its reliance on ad dollars over time.

However, with other AI apps already out and the hype train beginning to lose some steam, it's hard to imagine that this would be the biggest game-changer for reviving the app.

Still, it's pretty obvious that X is focusing on this as it continues searching for new ways to drive income while boosting its chances.