My guess ... it's probably less of a "social network" and more of a "they are trying to build a destination (portal) where users go to daily".
E.g. old days of Yahoo (portal)
They just want the next wave of Ghibli meme clicks to go to them, really.
This will be built on the existing thread+share infra ChatGPT already has, and just allow profiles to cross-post into conversations, with UI and features more geared toward remixing each other's images.
I actually would love this. I hate having to go to another website to share some thoughts I had using tools in a platform.
I miss the days when experiences would actually choose to integrate other platforms into their experiences, yes I was sort of a fan of the FB/Google share button and Twitter side feed (not the tracking bits though).
I wasn't a fan of LLM and the whole chat experience a few years ago, I'm a very mild convert now with the latest models and I'm getting some nominal benefit, so I would love to have some kind of shared chat session to brain storm, e.g. on a platform better than Figma.
The one integration of AI that I think is actually neat is Teams + AI Note taking. It's still a hit or miss a lot of the time, but it at least saves and notes something important 30% of the time.
Collaboration enhancements would be a wonderful outcome in place of AGI.
The answer seems more obvious to me. They dont even care if its competitive or scales too much. xAI has a crazy data advantage firehousing Twitter, llama FB/IG and CGPT just has, well, the internet.
Id hope they have some clever scheme to acquire users, but ultimately they want the data/