‘Grok is the RC Cola’ of the AI World

Joe Wilkins, writing at Futurism: In the AI world, there are what the tech scholar Kate Crawford has called the “Great Houses of AI.” These are Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Meta — giant tech monopolies which happen to also be four of the six top US corporations by market value. Then there are the lesser houses, the lower fiefdoms squabbling over the crumbs that fall from the big kids’ table. This is where we find Elon Musk’s xAI. Though the world’s richest man has pumped billions of dollars into his pet AI project, it seems all the money in the world can’t buy customers — or even respect, for that matter. According to the Wall Street Journal, new data shows the growth of xAI’s two-year old chatbot, Grok, has stagnated. Though Musk succeeded in giving Grok a temporary boost after integrating the thing into his social media site X, formerly Twitter, new monthly downloads have fallen from over 20 million in January to just 8.3 million in April. Here’s a bit from that WSJ piece, written…