[chatmasta]

This doesn’t strike me as an objective assessment of the state of affairs.

You could make the same “bleeding money” comment about many historical social media acquisitions – at least Twitter has advertising and subscription revenue. And it’s similarly suspect to argue that xAI is failing due to lack of revenue, without mentioning the astronomical valuations of its peers in the AI space, many of which are not only lacking revenue but also have no distribution channel comparable to the scale of Twitter/X.

xAI has one of the leading models in terms of investment and user base, and it’s rapidly improving on its evaluation metrics.

Twitter/X is one of the Top 10, if not Top 5, social media properties worldwide. It has hundreds of millions of monthly active users and maintains the lead in public consciousness as the “go to” place for 1-N broadcasting of information. While Bluesky shows promise, it won’t be dethroning Twitter any time soon. When has Bluesky been the source of breaking news?

And you cannot separate these two businesses. Twitter/X and X.ai are fundamentally coupled to one another. Twitter is not only a data source for X.ai but also a distribution and retention channel. There is an “ask Grok” button under every Tweet. And it’s not the only LLM that can be summoned via Tweet – with similar automations from companies like Perplexity proving there is value in the channel – but it is the only LLM with a native integration into the interface and first dibs on freshly-generated user content and breaking news.

[tsimionescu]

You're missing the fact that Twitter has essentially 0 advertising revenue compared to the other major social networks, as all major ad networks have stopped doing business with Twitter (this in turn being because of the very high likelihood that their ads would be shown next to content that their clients didn't want to be associated with, such as images of Hitler).