Elon Musk to introduce ads in Grok's responses

X's (formerly Twitter) owner, Elon Musk, announced on Wednesday that the platform will soon begin including ads in responses generated by Grok, its in-house AI chatbot. According to the media reports, the move is aimed at boosting X’s advertising business, which has been under pressure since the departure of former CEO Linda Yaccarino.

“Our focus thus far has just been on making Grok the smartest, most accurate AI in the world and I think we’ve largely succeeded in that,” Musk said during a live discussion with advertisers, the reports noted. “So we’ll turn our attention to how do we pay for those expensive GPUs.”

Musk reportedly explained that advertisers would be able to pay to have their solutions suggested by Grok in response to user queries. “If a user’s trying to solve a problem (by asking Grok), then advertising the specific solution would be ideal at that point,” he said.

According to media reports, the platform also plans to enhance ad targeting using technology developed by Musk’s AI company, xAI, in a $45 billion deal.

The platform had earlier introduced changes to ad formatting. It now bans hashtags, limits emoji use, and has implemented a new ‘aesthetic score’; ads that meet higher visual standards will cost less to run.