Elon Musk's Grok is losing ground in the AI race.

According to the WSJ , recent statistics show that Grok is losing traction compared to other AI products. For example, according to the analytics company AppMagic, the number of Grok app downloads dropped to only about 8.3 million in April, a decrease of 58.5% from the record high of over 20 million in January.

Meanwhile, according to a survey by research firm Recon Analytics of more than 260,000 US AI users, the percentage of users paying for Grok remained virtually unchanged in the first four months of the year, at 0.174%. More than 6% of respondents said they had paid for ChatGPT.

In the field of programming assistants, where competition among AI companies is fiercest, Grok is also considered to be lagging behind. According to Erik Bradley, chief strategist and research director at market analysis firm Enterprise Technology Research (ETR), Grok has seen virtually no growth in organizations and businesses. Meanwhile, the use of Claude and Gemini has skyrocketed.

In a survey of 500 people in March, ETR found that 48% of respondents said their businesses were using or would use Claude, up from 21% the previous year; 40% were using Gemini, up from 27%; but only 7% were using or planning to use Grok, up from 4%.

Grok has also been plagued by controversies. According to Recon Analytics research, when the AI peaked in January, the surge in downloads was related to an update that allowed users to ” undress ” other people in photos. This issue was heavily criticized by many experts and led to bans in several countries, forcing xAI to change.

“OpenAI is like Coca-Cola, Anthropic is Pepsi, and Grok is RC Cola. I’ve never really seen anyone drink RC Cola,” Ben Pouladian, a Los Angeles-based engineer and tech investor, said, using analogies to describe popular and unpopular soft drink brands in the U.S.

Pouladian shared that he uses many devices and technologies produced by Musk’s companies, such as Tesla cars, and actively participates in the X social network. When Grok launched in late 2023, he also downloaded and tried it, but was quickly disappointed because the product quality was not as high as Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, or Google’s Gemini.

Even Musk himself recognizes that Grok is falling behind its competitors. During the trial between him and OpenAI and Sam Altman, which began on April 28th, he described xAI as “quite small,” “very small,” and “the smallest of the artificial intelligence companies.”

According to TechCrunch , this is seen as an admission that xAI is falling behind. These words are a far cry from when the company first launched in late 2023. At that time, he emphasized his goal of making xAI the world’s most popular artificial intelligence platform through “maximum truth-seeking” and being less “extreme” than its competitors.

Earlier this year, xAI merged with SpaceX. Earlier this month, the company further secured an agreement with Anthropic for computing capacity at its Colossus 1 data center near Memphis, USA. Analysts are questioning whether Musk’s company can still keep up with its competitors, or whether it will shift towards a business model of leasing AI servers.

“Recent deals are showing that Musk is beginning to turn Colossus into an external computing platform for large AI companies instead of leveraging its power for internal model development,” commented Arnal Dayaratna, vice president of software development at IDC.

However, Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel, a company that provides hosting services for AI agents, believes it’s too early to rule Musk out of the AI race, while remaining optimistic that the billionaire’s recent restructuring of AI units will strengthen its competitiveness.

“Once Elon focuses, he performs very, very well,” Rauch added.

Bao Lam compilation

• AI Grok continues to be found creating pornographic images.
• The EU launches a large-scale investigation into social media platform X.
• Grok ‘created three million explicit images in 11 days’
• Grok stopped creating sexually explicit images of real people.
• The first country to block the AI chatbot Grok due to sensitive content.