Advertisement It was lucky that Musk 1) didn’t succeed in getting out of the Twitter deal and 2) bought it before the Democrats made a mess of the 2024 election and lost it to Trump. But another piece of the deal’s timing was, on pure financial terms, even luckier. The Twitter deal closed Oct. 28, 2022. Almost exactly one month later, OpenAI launched ChatGPT, which immediately became one of the most used apps in the world and created a stock-market infatuation with artificial intelligence that still has barely cooled. Musk, a co-founder of OpenAI who had left the company over disagreements with its leadership, saw the most obvious business opportunity in the world. Twitter, which he would soon rename, was one of the internet’s great fire hoses of user-generated text. It would be optimal fuel for an A.I. model that needed to eat up people’s words to grow strong. By the following April, Musk said he was working on a “maximally truth-seeking” generative A.I. Now we have a good sense of what he meant by that. Advertisement Musk’s chatbot, Grok, has become an inescapable part of the user experience on X. It trains on the many millions of posts that publish on the site each day. It has a special tab on X’s app, and in recent months, it has become a prominent part of on-platform conversations. Under all kinds of viral tweets, you’ll see someone asking Grok to explain or verify what the original poster was talking about. (“Grok, explain this.”) X is also now home to an especially seedy kind of engagement bait, in which accounts that pay for boosted reach ask Grok to randomly pick winners of $100 from among the replies. (Really.) Advertisement For the most part, the bot is an unremarkable player in a market flooded with chatbots. Though Grok has both its own app and the advantage of being tied into an existing social media giant, its usage appears to be a decimal-point fraction of what ChatGPT gets. In a vacuum, it wouldn’t be worth caring about. Advertisement