Users of Grok Bot, the personal assistant made by Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence firm, are finding themselves cut off from their AI agents.
SpaceXSI, which includes both Elon Musk’s rocket firm as well as its AI work and the social network X, introduced Grok Bot in August. It described the tool as “AI teammates you can give real work to”.
It came amid a flurry of such personal AI assistants launched by many of the world’s biggest artificial intelligence firms. The most prominent among them is Meta’s Muse, though OpenAI has also pushed its own system, called Dots.
Now, however, Mr Musk has been hit by complaints from users of the service who say that they are rapidly running out of usage and so finding themselves unable to access the tool. As with many AI systems, each Grok Bot user is allocated a certain amount of work and any questions will run that down.
In response to a complaint from a user who complained that they had hit their weekly maximum usage with four days until it was reset, Mr Musk said that the system was expensive and was not making enough money. “The cost of serving Grok Bot was unsustainably high relative to revenue,” he wrote in a reply on X.
Such personal assistants are particularly resource intensive, because they can be asked to undertake complicated tasks and operate as a team of co-ordinated AI systems. But companies are nonetheless pushing them as the future of both our work and personal lives.
Many of those companies – including SpaceXSI, Meta and OpenAI – are losing vast sums of money across their AI work. But they appear to be betting that the cost of running the systems will serve as an investment for the future, by allowing them to acquire users and build more complex systems.
But it remains unclear how those companies will be able to keep running the tools and making money, given the vast expense required to actually offer them. While all of the companies have some kind of payment system – Grok Bot is only available to those who pay for SpaceXSI’s AI tools, and OpenAI has restricted Dots to users with its more expensive accounts – some, including Meta’s Muse, come with a free tier.
At the moment, that is the primary way that companies make back some of the cost of offering those personal agents. But Meta may have offered a hint at how it could make money from its Muse service in other ways: in its latest results, the first since it released its agentic assistant, it noted that shopping was one of the top ways that users were interacting with it, which could presumably be used for advertising in the future.
