Elon Musk has a vision for the future: [Twitter, archive] Saving money for the distant future is pointless with the advent of super intelligent abundance Huge if true! Unfortunately, It’s not a vision for the present. Grok Bot is Elon Musk’s response to the popular OpenClaw bot — an AI personal…
Annons
Annons
Elon Musk has a vision for the future: [Twitter, archive] Saving money for the distant future is pointless with the advent of super intelligent abundance Huge if true! Unfortunately, It’s not a vision for the present. Grok Bot is Elon Musk’s response to the popular OpenClaw bot — an AI personal assistant, but running on Grok! [xAI] (By the way, Musk has gone ahead with renaming SpaceXAI as SpaceXSI.) [xAI] Some users love Grok Bot! They love it so much that they’re running out of usage credits on Grok, and xAI cuts them off. Musk was talking up Grok Bot pretty well for a while. During SpaceX’s Q3 2026 earnings call, he said it had the “the fastest growth of a product that I’ve ever seen in my life.” [SpaceX] Well, yeah — that’s because you were subsidizing token burn to grow your user base. Grok Bot has users. So now it’s time to squeeze. One user complained: “my Grok Bot usage is 100% and it’s 4 days till reset. WTF happened? Normally I don’t even reach 100%.” [Twitter, archive] Musk replied, “The cost of serving Grok Bot was unsustainably high relative to revenue.” [Twitter, archive] That’s something you’re not supposed to admit out loud, Elon! (We love that “was” there. Maybe Elon got bored already.) Users complain their usage meters are jumping up unpredictably. From the Cursor AI code editor forum: [Cursor] Right now, while I’m actively talking and working, the weekly usage meter under Usage at the bottom of the Grok Bot app keeps flipping in real time: 74%, then 77%, then 100% (capped), back to 77%, back to 100%, over and over. Another user said their usage meter doubled from 33% to 66%. [Telegraph, archive] It’s OK! Elon is delighted to upsell you on his lovely assistant bot: “Upgrade to higher usage plan cost increase is too high?” [Twitter, archive] Grok Bot starts on the $30/month plan. The $100/month plan has 15 times the usage limits. [xAI] But 15 times what, precisely? The pricing page doesn’t say what that usage is measured in. The problem for AI vendors is that chatbots are expensive to run and customers have gotten used to heavily subsidized prices. The vendors thought the subsidized prices would be loss leaders and perhaps chatbots would get super efficient and effectve and inference would be cheap and the companies might turn a profit! But then the technology hit the top of its S-curve almost immediately. So the vendors turned to using hundreds or thousands of times as many tokens per query to get marginally better results. So SpaceX needs more money to feed the token machine. SpaceX can get more funding by releasing stock to the public markets. Or borrowing even more money. Anthropic is trying to fix the same problem the same way. Hence trying to do a stock market IPO and putting out an S-1 that’s almost as bad as WeWork’s 2019 IPO, which failed when people saw the numbers — and wasn’t riding a bubble. We’re not going to go through Anthropic’s newly-revised S-1 — this version is still just a draft, we’ll wait for the final version, if any — but the Q3 2026 numbers Anthropic’s included in this version are dismal, and we can see why they left them out the first time. [SEC] Anthropic’s Q2 numbers were heavily juiced by tokenmaxxing — where corporate users were competing with each other to use as much AI as possible, so the C-levels could look more committed to AI. This cost a fortune, so tokenmaxxing ended in Q3 — and you can see this in Anthropic’s net figures for the quarter. Revenue went up — but operating expenses went through the roof. [Amazon] AI vendors have spent this year trying not to lose a fortune on subsidized AI. AI bros will argue that tokens are so much cheaper now — but their Anthropic bills only keep going up. And now their Grok Bot bills. Funny, that. Investors want to see real returns. SEC filings that describe a sci-fi vision of the future at length fall flat when a company will very obviously just run out of money. “Super intelligent abundance” is nothing to real cash when real bills come due. Video — Podcast