Inside the Wallet of Grok's AI Companion

0:00Recently, XAI and Elon Musk unveiled a whole bunch of new features for Grok, their AI assistant. And they have, you know, they have all these like anime characters that are in there that you can now talk to AI characters. And they also had a brand new model Grok 4 that was launched today on the podcast. I want to break down all of the statistics and numbers of basically what has happened to the company since all these announcements. Has the complete company completely cratered? Has it grown? The results I was absolutely mind blown by and not for the reasons that you would think. So I'm going to be diving into all of that.

0:34I feel like this episode is almost going to play out like a case study in viral app and, you know, AI marketing. What happens is all publicity is no publicity, bad publicity. Or is there something that you should probably some things you should probably not do? We're going to get into all of that on the podcast today. But before we do, I wanted to mention if you want to try the latest model of Grok 4, I would love for you to go try out AIbox.ai, my very own startup where we have 40 of the top AI models, um, all on the same platform for$20 a month. So you don't need subscriptions to every single platform, uh, to try every different AI model out.

1:11You can get it all there. We have, uh, around 40 different AI image and, um, audio models as well. And you can chat with all of them in the same thread, like chat GPT, but you just switch between what model you want to talk to. Sometimes if you get a response from one model where you're like, ah, I don't really like how Claude answered that you get it to regenerate the with Google Gemini or with ChatGPT and see if you get better responses from different models, because models do have different strengths and weaknesses. So this is something really fun that I like to play with. 20 bucks a month link is in the description, AI box.ai.

1:40It's in beta right now. And I would love to have you test it out. And let me know what you think. Let me know if you think of any new features that we should be adding. We're actively developing this. All right, let's get into what's going on right now with the latest in Grok's, the latest in Grok's analytics, basically. So what's interesting, they just pulled it, they just unveiled all of these new AI companions, Elon Musk had, you know, all of these, you know, goth anime girl, AI companion that can talk to you and this, you know, fuzzy animal that's, you know, Freddy, but you could turn it into bad Freddy, and then it can cuss you out and yell at you if you want.

2:16So there's like these different, these different companions, do they actually make money? You know, what is kind of the end game there? I think it's really there's some interesting parallels with character AI and perplexity and kind of the ways they're approaching growth in the AI sector, how they're planning on growing. But what are what was the outcome? So basically, what happened was Grok 4 launched on July 9. And by the 11th Grok's gross revenue on iOS, right, so we can go look, there's a bunch of there's like sensor tower and app figures, a bunch of these tools that basically track how much money of these apps are generating.

2:51And basically, the iOS revenue jumped by about 325%. So this is before the anime girlfriend came out. This is when it was just Grok for the new model. And basically, that new model be every benchmark and Grok for was, you know, by benchmarks, the number one AI model is the smartest. And so the the usage jumped by about the gross revenue jumped by about 325 % to$419 ,000. So this was up from about$99 ,000 the day before Grok launched, which is pretty impressive. It put in way higher numbers than usual following the launch of the new model. So gross revenue was 367 for a couple days following, then it kind of dipped down, went to about 300 ,000 by the 14th of July.

3:38And in addition to that, beyond just the revenue, which definitely saw a big spike. Daily downloads of the app increased by about 279%. So we went to about 197 ,000 by July 11th. And that's up from 50 ,000. So basically it went from 50 ,000 to 200 ,000 in one day, which is just huge. So many downloads. And that's all thanks to Grok4. They had the new model. Everybody wanted to test it out. So it saw like a huge, you know, huge jump. So basically with all of that, this is that's what we saw after they announced the new model grok 4 so what happened when they announced all of the new ai companions which i personally on my podcast have kind of talked about how i think that they're dumb and yada yada and people you know are telling me all the reasons why they're not dumb so i i see there's two sides of the argument but in any case um following all of the ai companions being launched the downloads and revenue increased but it was definitely less pronounced so i think a lot of people are kind of curious about this and that's why they would want to go install it and see you know how it was uh doing um and it's about 30 bucks a month if you want super grok so that's what you have to like have in order to use it although i think if you just get a premium subscription of twitter which is what i have then you get you know premium uh you get a premium xai or grok account and i think that's cheaper i think i'm paying i can't remember but um i thought it was cheaper maybe maybe actually they bumped it up so i'm not sure i I should double check on that.

5:04In any case, the the iOS downloads were up by about 40 percent the day after. So that's compared to, you know, that's after the companions launched. So they were at about 171 ,000 daily installs. Revenue increased about nine percent. So it hit 337 ,000. That's not like insane, right? Like we went from, you know, on the last the last time they they put out a huge release. The the revenue went from like 99 ,000 so basically 100 ,000 to 420 ,000 right so it was like 4x and this time they're jumping up um they're jumping up to about 327 or 337 ,000 so it's and and they were already like much higher on average so it wasn't uh it wasn't anything too crazy i think that there was definitely an impact from the ai companions but i think it was way smaller than when they released a new ai model which is interesting.

6:01People, as I predicted, would appreciate a better model more than an AI companion that can talk to you. I think that's kind of a no brainer. You could use the AI model for literally everything and empowering everything in the chat companions kind of a novelty. It's kind of funny. It's probably a big marketing gimmick. But in any case, I did think this is pretty interesting. Now, what I will mention is that XAI did announce that in addition to Grok four and grok four heavy, it's going to have a$300 per month subscription called grok, super grok heavy. This is the most expensive plan. And honestly, everybody has like a$200 a month plan anyways, Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, like everybody's, especially if you have these video models.

6:43So it's not crazy that they have a more expensive tier. $300 is I think one of the more expensive of the most expensive tiers that I've seen. So, you know, I I'm curious to see what kind of usage they get, like if more people are using that, they are the best model. And so I think when you are the number one model, you can demand a premium. I'd be curious to see how many people actually signed up for that, though, because I feel like even the$200 a month from OpenAI, they basically use it to get you to use operator and OpenAI's Sora image or video model, right? So they like have all these really cool features that seem like they add a ton of value.

7:18And that's kind of what's the$200 feels like it's paywalling. Whereas this, it's just for basically deep research, which I think OpenAI technically has like a$200 premium deep research tool, but I don't know how many people were paying the$200 exclusively for that. So I think it's going to be interesting to see the Grok subscription plan demand, especially since all of these launches have come out. Now, I will say as far as their app is going and ranking on the overall charts grok uh after you know all of this stuff came out grok's new model got grok to rank to basically go up in the u.s app store it was the number three app overall it was number two in productivity um but that definitely went down after the new model came out um and the app is now about number 17 although it's still number two in productivity which is pretty great so overall popular, but not the most popular.

8:16We have way more data on iOS than on Android. And also they keep coming out with new features on iOS first before Android, as I feel like everybody does. And as Android users always complain about. So I think that we're definitely going to be seeing a way bigger bump on iOS than Android just because the features aren't always over there as well. So this is super interesting. I think overall, the moral of the story is AI companies, we beg you, please focus on making better models and not just gimmicks or new features, which might seem interesting, but aren't really going to drive you that much more revenue and users.

8:52Although better models is pretty hard. Getting to be the number one benchmark model is not easy. And so big kudos over to the XAI team. They've done that in a record amount of time. I think 12 months ago, they didn't really have any product at all. and 12 months later, they're the number one AI model beating, you know, OpenAI. Now, are they the number one AI company? Absolutely not. OpenAI has a video model, has a killer image model, has operator, which can complete tasks. So have we maybe hit a plateau on text? I'm not sure. Apparently, OpenAI is testing a new model right now, which is quote unquote GPT-5.

9:28And it's in all of these like test arenas where that's basically anonymous and it's absolutely dominating. So OpenAI may come out with something that completely dominates XAI and Grok4 very soon. Right now, Grok4 is the winner. It's the top model. How long will that last? That is the question. When it does get unseated from its throne, which inevitably will happen, I will be the first one to let you know and update you on that. So thank you so much for tuning into the podcast today. I hope this was interesting to kind of hear basically what types of products grow revenue and downloads for these AI companies.

10:00If you learned anything new, make sure to leave a comment or rating and review on the podcast, a comment and subscribe. If you're watching this on YouTube where I've been sharing my screen the whole time, I'm breaking down some interesting charts. And if you want to try out all the top AI models, I would love for you to try out AI box. AI. Our platform is in beta and I've been thrilled by everyone's feedback and suggestions that is testing it out and using it right now. We're implementing everything. There are some crazy new features coming that will be launching shortly. So I'll tell you about them.

10:30but yeah make sure you go check out the platform the link is in the description and I will catch you in the next episode