Musk's major AI move has been revealed.
On August 23rd Eastern Time, Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk announced that his artificial intelligence (AI) startup xAI has open-sourced its Grok 2.5 model. The day before, Musk also stated he would establish a new company called "Macrohard" to leverage AI power against Microsoft's software business.
**Musk Open-Sources Grok-2**
On August 24th Beijing time, Tesla Motors CEO Musk officially announced on X that xAI's best model from last year, Grok-2.5 (actually Grok-2), has been formally open-sourced. Additionally, Grok-3 will also be open-sourced within approximately 6 months. Musk simultaneously expressed his view that xAI will soon surpass any company except Google, and then will also surpass Google. "But Chinese companies will be the strongest competitors because they have much more electricity than the United States and are extremely strong in hardware construction."
Regarding open-source permissions, xAI clarified that commercial use is only permitted when affiliated companies have annual revenues below one million dollars. Commercial use beyond this threshold requires separate licensing from xAI. Unless permitted by the agreement terms for Grok 2 modifications or fine-tuning, materials, derivatives, or outputs (including generated data) cannot be used to train, create, or improve any foundation, large language, or general artificial intelligence models.
Meanwhile, the Grok App launched version v1.1.58 with new features including improved Imagine image generation speed, more vivid and interesting Companions functionality, and Vision mode now available to all Android users, providing a comprehensive upgrade to user experience.
Notably, the Grok AI chat platform was recently exposed for privacy issues. Over 370,000 AI chat records on the Grok website have been published and indexed by search engines, meaning these chat contents are now publicly accessible. Beyond the chat records themselves, Grok has also published user-uploaded photos, spreadsheets, and other documents. The platform provides a share button allowing users to share conversations with others through unique URL links. However, these links can be accessed by search engines, enabling anyone to view these chat records, not just those who received the links.
**Musk: X Platform Plans to Introduce Ads in Grok Responses**
On August 7th, during a live event on the X platform, Elon Musk announced a major transformation to advertisers: embedding advertising content in his artificial intelligence chatbot Grok's responses. Musk stated that when users seek problem solutions from Grok, the system will recommend related products or services as "specific solutions."
Musk painted a seemingly harmonious picture of advertising integration into chat experiences, where ads would become a natural component of answers rather than disruptions when users seek solutions. The advertising display format will differ from traditional digital advertising, with Grok's AI system deeply customizing recommended content based on user query context, seamlessly weaving brand information into helpful answers. xAI plans to make this process highly automated, with Musk promising advertisers they will be able to "upload ads without any additional operations," as AI will handle the entire process from targeting to optimization.
Driving this transformation is not only innovation enthusiasm but also harsh economic reality. Musk admitted that the GPU costs for running advanced AI models are astronomical. "Our current focus is making Grok the world's smartest and most accurate AI, and I think we've basically achieved that," Musk stated during the livestream. "Next, we'll think about how to pay for those expensive GPUs."
In May this year, xAI deployed 200,000 GPUs at computing facilities in Memphis, Tennessee, and plans to build a new supercomputing center equipped with 1 million GPUs in the suburbs. These hardware investments require sustainable financial support, with advertising revenue viewed as a key solution to this challenge.
The entire industry is exploring sustainable AI business models, and Musk's initiative places X at the forefront of AI commercialization experiments. Previously, X platform had also indicated in an email to advertisers that it has used xAI's technology to improve ad relevance and retrained models for measuring ad click conversion to sales. Since June, online advertising conversion volume has increased by 40%.
Meta has already proven that large models help improve advertising effectiveness. During a recent earnings call, Meta revealed that this quarter, Instagram's ad conversion rates improved by approximately 5% with AI assistance, while Facebook improved by 3%.
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