Musk says Grok Bot costs were unsustainably high as users ran out early

Elon Musk says Grok Bot was costing SpaceX too much to run for the money it brought in. He said so on X on Sunday. He was replying to subscribers whose weekly usage of the AI agent had run out days early.

One user, posting as Doge Norway, asked him for a reset. Lots of people said their usage “ran out really fast this week”, the user wrote. Musk replied on X:

“The cost of serving Grok Bot was unsustainably high relative to revenue,” Musk wrote.

His posts did not say how much Grok Bot costs to run. Nor did they say whether SpaceX had cut allowances, Siladitya Ray noted for Forbes. In another reply, Musk asked a user if a plan with more usage cost too much. A third reply said “just being sensible”. Tom Carter of Business Insider reported it as Musk defending smaller allowances.

Over the weekend, subscribers posted on X that their usage meters had jumped. One user’s meter went from 33% to 66%, the Telegraph reported. Others passed their limit overnight.

On Cursor’s community forum, users said their weekly meter flipped between 77% and 100%. Their activity had not changed. On Sunday, Cursor reported a problem with billing and its usage dashboard, according to Forbes. It was later marked as resolved. It is not clear whether that problem caused the jumps.

Grok Bot is a separate product from the Grok chatbot. SpaceX launched the agent in August. It uses a virtual computer to carry out tasks such as shopping. Its plans run up to $200 a month. In October, Musk said it would also use Claude, Midjourney and Suno.

The posts came less than two weeks after SpaceX’s third-quarter earnings call. On that call, SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell said Grok Bot had 800,000 paid weekly users in early October. That was more than double the month before.

“I’ve never seen anything grow this fast,” Musk said on the call.

He also said Grok Bot may end up using most of the company’s compute. Several X users answered his new posts with one of his recent claims. In October, he wrote that saving money for the distant future is pointless, because AI will bring abundance.

OpenAI will merge the separate ChatGPT and Codex allowances next month, the Telegraph reported. People who use both could hit their caps sooner. OpenAI said higher-paying subscribers would get bigger allowances. It made no such promise for cheaper plans.

Meta has not said what its Muse agent costs to run. Mark Zuckerberg told investors last month that Muse is “very compute-intensive” and not yet profitable, Business Insider reported. Muse passed 10 million users in October.

With expertise in digital marketing, product management, and branding & identity, Ana Maria Constantin develops strategies that resonate (show all) With expertise in digital marketing, product management, and branding & identity, Ana Maria Constantin develops strategies that resonate with our target audience in the software/SaaS industry. Collaboration and teamwork are paramount to her, as she loves empowering her colleagues to achieve outstanding results and unlock their full potential.

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