{"id":903657,"date":"2026-11-02T21:42:12","date_gmt":"2026-11-02T21:42:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/903657\/"},"modified":"2026-11-02T21:42:12","modified_gmt":"2026-11-02T21:42:12","slug":"elon-musk-needs-to-save-money-on-grok-days-after-saying-ai-makes-saving-money-pointless","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/903657\/","title":{"rendered":"Elon Musk Needs to Save Money on Grok, Days After Saying AI Makes Saving Money Pointless"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Friday afternoon, Elon Musk confidently declared to the world<\/a> that \u201cSaving money for the distant future is pointless with the advent of super intelligent abundance.\u201d Three days later, the same Elon Musk said the cost of running AI was getting a little too steep even for him, and that he needed to start saving a little money.<\/p>\n

The billionaire appears to have imposed a tighter-than-usual weekly token limit on Grok Bot, the always-on AI agent launched<\/a> by his company xAI in August, due to its out-of-control tab. \u201cThe cost of serving Grok Bot was unsustainably high relative to revenue,\u201d Musk wrote in an X post<\/a> Sunday afternoon responding to a user who complained they\u2019d hit their weekly usage limit earlier than usual, and asked Musk personally for a reset.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Multiple users chimed in to say they were surprised to see their Grok Bot token allowances had been suddenly and inexplicably depleted. \u201cI was at 68% yesterday and woke up to 98%,\u201d one person wrote in an X post<\/a>. \u201cWhat\u2019s it called when you take away something someone already paid for? Isn\u2019t that theft?\u201d Another<\/a> wrote, \u201cIs Elon joking or are we getting royally screwed here? My usage went from 58% to 100% in less than an hour with nothing running. What is going on?\u201d It\u2019s unclear if xAI will permanently enforce a stricter token limit moving forward or if this was a one-off emergency measure; the company didn\u2019t immediately respond to Gizmodo\u2019s request for comment.<\/p>\n

Developed in response to other popular AI agents like OpenAI\u2019s Dots<\/a> and Meta\u2019s Muse<\/a>, Grok Bot has been promoted by xAI as a kind of virtual teammate that can be trusted to handle complex tasks while also checking back in for human approval when needed. Like Dots and Muse, Grok Bot runs on its own virtual computer (rather than on users\u2019 devices) and can operate around the clock, even when users are offline.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That makes them much more sophisticated than more limited chatbots, but it also means they tend to burn through tokens at a quicker rate. Tech companies like OpenAI, Meta, and xAI have therefore been trying to balance<\/a> capability with cost: shipping ever-more agentic consumer AI tools while simultaneously being mindful of users\u2019 budgets. And of their own.<\/p>\n

While Muse is free\u2014a big factor behind its popularity\u2014Dots and Grok Bot are currently only available to paying customers. Judging from Musk\u2019s Sunday X post, there haven\u2019t been enough Grok subscribers willing to pay for the agent to justify its continued strain on xAI\u2019s servers. (Grok Bot subscribers are given<\/a> a weekly \u201cpool\u201d of tokens to use, which varies depending on the plan. They also have the option of paying for \u201con-demand\u201d credits which the agent can use after the weekly pool has run out.)<\/p>\n

Musk may have also been keeping an eye on user complaints and decided it was better to simply stifle the system rather than have to deal with a class action lawsuit from disgruntled subscribers, as its competitor Anthropic has had to do<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In any event, probably a good call for everyone to keep saving for the future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On Friday afternoon, Elon Musk confidently declared to the world that \u201cSaving money for the distant future is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":903658,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,3298,181,507,11,641,1282,1283,74,4119],"class_list":["post-903657","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-ai-agents","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-elon-musk","tag-grok","tag-meta","tag-openai","tag-technology","tag-xai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/903657","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=903657"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/903657\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/903658"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=903657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=903657"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=903657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}