xAI is falling in rankings, but Musk can still bring the startup back onto the stage

OpenAI believes that Elon Musk’s legal claims are aimed less at OpenAI itself and more at his own startup xAI, founded in 2023 and recently joined to SpaceX. Experts say that if Musk has sufficient motivation, he can restore the project’s former momentum.

Key events:

Date Event May 2024 – xAI signed a lease agreement with Anthropic for Colossus 1 computing capacity. Previously these resources were planned for the company’s own tasks, which may indicate a slowdown in the development of the Grok chatbot. April 2024 – In his testimony, Musk called xAI “the smallest of AI companies.”

Popularity metrics:

- *AppMagic* (Wall Street Journal data): downloads of the Grok app fell from over 20 million in January to 8.3 million by the end of April.

- *Recon Analytics*: out of 260,000 U.S. users of AI services, only 0.174 % (current quarter) paid for a Grok subscription – almost the same as a year ago. This is far below the 6 % share of paying ChatGPT subscribers.

- *Enterprise Technology Research*: by March, 7 % of corporate respondents were already using or planned to use Grok (last year – 4 %). Competitors are growing faster: Claude – from 21 % to 48 %, Google Gemini – from 27 % to 40 %.

Why Grok lags:

- It lacks features demanded by corporate clients.

- OpenAI and Anthropic actively develop AI coding and office automation tools, which Grok currently does not have.

Possible path to success:

Many in the industry believe Musk can change the situation. He has already carried out a major reorganization of xAI; this could be the first step toward “revenge.” In the rapidly changing AI market, clients are not tied to one platform – if Grok suddenly shows noticeable improvements over competitors, its popularity could rise sharply.