Elon Musk’s unconventional choices at product development seem to be already yielding results.
Grok has become the number 1 app in Japan after introducing a Japanese waifu named Ani as an “AI companion” on the app. Grok was in top place on the Japanese app store, leaving behind OpenAI, which was number 3, and Google’s Gemini, which was number 5.
Nikita Bier, who is X’s recently-appointed Head of Product, also talked about how Japan was taking to Grok in a big way. “Servers immediately went offline when Japan woke up,” he posted on X. He also hinted that AI companion waifus like Ani would be commonplace in AI apps going forward. “We are going to look back on Pre-Waifu AI like it was the Ice Age,” he said.
In anime and manga communities, a “waifu” is a fictional female character that someone has a strong, often romantic, attachment to. It’s essentially a term for their ideal fictional partner, sometimes extending to viewing them as their ideal wife. The term is a Japanization of the English word “wife”.
Grok had introduced a Waifu named Ani in its app two days ago. Ani wears a short black dress and fishnet stockings. Ani could answer user queries like a normal chatbot, but also had audio and video modes. More interestingly, Ani is designed to flirt with the user in her sultry voice. In Level 5 “spicy mode”, Ani goes a bit further, wearing ever-skimpier clothing, and flirting even more fervently with the user.
The AI companions feature seems to have broken the clutter and worked for Grok, helping it stand out from the more staid offerings from other AI companies like OpenAI, Google and Anthropic. It seems to have worked particularly well in Japan, given how anime and manga is a big part of the popular culture there. And it might take similar product innovations to help AI companies stand out in what is largely becoming a fairly undifferentiated space in terms of the core models powering these platforms.