X's road from "everything app" to nothing app
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Elon Musk's grand plans to turn Twitter into an "everything app" named X have evaporated as AI seizes the wandering attention of the world's richest man.
The big picture: X, once touted as a "global town square," has become a strip mine for AI training data instead.
- The transformation became unmistakable in March, when Musk turned X into a subsidiary of his xAI startup.
- Today X's chief economic value to Musk is its ability to feed mountains of human-generated text and live information into xAI's Grok — and then provide Grok with a ready base of users and testers.
- Grok, which debuted in 2023 as a jokier, more casual alternative to ChatGPT with fewer restraints on its behavior, has now been woven into every nook and cranny of X, where every post includes a Grok button.
Catch up quick: Wednesday's announcement that X CEO Linda Yaccarino was leaving the company ended any lingering illusions that X might rekindle ad sales growth.
- X, which is now a private company that doesn't have to share its financials, is estimated to be bringing in roughly half the revenue today that it had been bringing in when Musk bought Twitter.
The intrigue: As long as X was a separate company, its struggle for ad dollars would weigh on its ability to raise money and grow.
- Now X is just a line item on xAI's balance sheet, which is wildly inflated in AI's giddy market moment.
Yes, but: The AI industry has problems, too.
- On Monday, Musk announced he'd be unveiling the latest edition of his AI model, Grok 4, Wednesday evening.
- But Grok, the AI bot designed by Musk as an anti-woke truth-teller, spent Tuesday spouting antisemitic ideas.
- After Grok started calling itself "MechaHitler," Musk's deputies at xAI pulled its plug and reset its instructions.
Flashback: One of Musk's big beefs with Twitter's previous leaders was that he said they let bots run rampant and drown out human voices.
- Now X's main character is a bot.
The bottom line: AI is replacing social media as the tech industry's dominant platform. That means X might not be the only social network to get swallowed up by AI.
