By Do you trust this man to know a good joke? | Illustration by Laura Normand / The Verge
Fine. Let’s talk about xAI, which is getting funded to the tune of $1 billion or whatever.
xAI is, according to some commentators, Elon Musk’s bid to “save X,” the platform better known as Twitter. Musk may have spectacularly struck out with advertisers and failed to make up the shortfall with subscriptions, the thinking goes, but he can fundraise off the hype of a new AI product currently available only to a subset of blue checks. That product is Grok: a ChatGPT-style answer bot allegedly possessing a sense of humor. This raises several questions, particularly since AI chatbots remain a money pit with an unsure path to profit. But one sticks out to me: why is Grok so unfunny?
xAI’s website makes it clear Grok is launching from a weird…