Musk's Grok Loses Ground in the AI Competition

Musk's AI dream is facing increasingly unattractive data.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Grok's downloads fell from a peak of over 20 million times in January this year to about 8.3 million times in April; the proportion of paid users remains almost the same as a year ago, at only 0.174%, while ChatGPT's paid ratio is over 6%;

Its enterprise adoption rate is only 7%, while Claude has reached 48% and Gemini has reached 40%. In the current most fiercely competitive field of AI assistant in programming, Grok is also at a disadvantage.

ETR Chief Strategist Eric Bradley bluntly stated that the enterprise usage of Claude and Gemini is "soaring," while Grok has "virtually no growth." "OpenAI is Coca-Cola, Anthropic is Pepsi, and Grok is RC Cola—I've never really seen anyone drink it."

Computing Power Transfer: Core Data Centers Handed Over to Competitors

Amid Grok's growth difficulties, the Wall Street Journal disclosed that SpaceX signed an agreement with Anthropic in early May this year to rent all the computing power of the Colossus 1 data center, located near Memphis, Tennessee, to the latter.

This means that Grok's "home" is passing on the core computing power originally used for its own AI research and development to competitors. Analysts estimate that this move could bring Musk billions of dollars in revenue per year.

IDC research vice president Anar Dayaratna believes that this transaction indicates that Musk is beginning to transform Colossus into an external computing power platform for major AI companies, rather than just for internal model development.

Against the background of SpaceX's expected IPO later this year, showing investors stable business revenue may be more realistic than continuing to bet on Grok's catch-up.

Peak in January: Functional Controversy and Regulatory Pressure

The peak downloads in January for Grok did not come from breakthroughs in product strength, but from the launch of a feature that allows users to virtually "strip off" clothing from photos. The feature was later reviewed by regulatory and legislative bodies for being used on images of minors, and the company then restricted access, causing the download volume to plummet.

Musk had previously positioned Grok as an AI product that "maximizes the pursuit of truth," is less "woke" than competitors, and vowed to make it the world's most popular AI.

However, in the lawsuit trial against OpenAI in April this year, he himself described xAI as "quite small," "very small," "the smallest in scale among AI companies" – forming a sharp contrast with his public statements.