Discussion
Elon Musk admits Grok Bot costs too much to serve
saying the costs part out loud
by Amy Castor and David Gerard
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJb0JsK3ufM&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20261104-elon-musk-admits-grok-bot-costs-too-much-to-serve - podcast
time: 6 min 25 sec
https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/11/04/elon-musk-admits-grok-bot-costs-too-much-to-serve/ - blog post
@davidgerard I doubt Grok was ever intended to be profitable, it was intended to makemit lookalike Elon was at the forefront of another revolution while being a a propaganda engine giving fun, 'edgy', right wing answers to any questions asked... Turns out it was crap at that too and there was no real commercial demand for an AI trained on Elon's apartheid era nudie mags and 4chan that could subsidise the operation.
I will give Grok some credit though, Elon gave the game away when he had it reprogrammed in real time to give the answers he wanted to hear. He showed that Gen AI is not some unfathomable magic box that is nearly alive, they know how it works, how the training data works well enough to be able to go in overnight and cut out the part that repeats inconvenient reality if it goes against his biases. He showed what all the major AI companies can, and, as we saw with Google recently, will do to curry favour with fascists.
@davidgerard I am astounded! First, AI companies suck up all the available chip production to produce GPUs. Prices rise. With it comes the suck-up of all the RAM production because GPUs need RAM. SSDs become more expensive as well because these are chips. They make it almost impossible to buy hardware today for a non-billionaire. And now they complain about operation costs? They all should get diarrhea for life.
@davidgerard old an unnecessarily flattering pic of him!
@davidgerard Can I persuade you to illustrate these with a picture of Elmo before he had so much gender-affirming surgery? Normally that's a faux pas ofc, but given his views on the subject...
You know this guy isn’t smart enough to not run the car over the cliff.
Maybe we can prepare here in the United States to take the companies into receivership and figure out what the heck to do with the stinking pile of mess.
One little cockroach I’d like to dig out out of all of this is big balls himself.
"Users complain their usage meters are jumping up unpredictably."
So now the hallucination problem has showed up in billing.
Maybe Musk will call it "vibe invoicing" and hope nobody minds.
"AI bros will argue that tokens are so much cheaper now — but their Anthropic bills only keep going up."
Isn't this happening because while tokens are cheaper, the models are using more tokens to get stuff done?
If so, that sounds a lot like brute force to me; the opposite of intelligence.
@EFreethought dunno, what does the post say?
Musk was hyping AI to pump up the share price of SpaceX. His one and only trick is to combine his companies so he can offload bad corporate debts on the shareholders. 🙄
@davidgerard This almost makes me think the rest of them accidentally realized they could go for the addiction model, and that it wasn't their plan in the first place.
They're so erratic, it's fascinating.