Ads may soon appear in responses from Grok, the X-embedded AI chatbot, the platform’s owner Elon Musk said in a livestreamed conversation with advertisers Wednesday evening. 

Musk, who purchased Twitter in 2022 before changing its name to X and folding it into his AI startup xAI, said he hoped advertising in Grok would generate funding for investment in AI development. In particular, ads could help pay for GPUs, the pricey, high-processing-power chips that support the development of large language models, he said. 

“We’ll turn our attention to, ‘How do we pay for those expensive GPUs?’,” Musk said.

Musk then described his vision for a largely automated advertising process for X. Advertisers could soon, he suggested, “be able to upload an ad” to Grok “and do nothing else,” letting the system aid in everything from targeting to campaign optimization. Such developments would follow a handful of recent rollouts of AI-enabled advertising features on X. “If a user’s trying to solve a problem [with Grok], then advertising the specific solution would be ideal at that point,” he said.

Musk also hinted at plans for an in-app checkout feature to enable purchases directly within X.

The news arrives less than a month after the departure of CEO Linda Yaccarino, who spent two years at the platform’s helm endeavoring to smooth over relationships with advertisers after many cut back investments over brand safety concerns and extremist content on X. While Yaccarino was able to win back some ad spend and develop a handful of content deals, X’s ad revenues remain far below pre-Musk levels. 

Under Musk, the company has pivoted more into AI tools and monetization, including its chatbot Grok. On the call, Musk claimed Grok is becoming “the smartest, most accurate AI in the world” despite the chatbot’s recent history of spreading misinformation, including a bout of extremist and antisemitic content last month that led to its brief shutdown.