Why is xAI giving up their advantage? Is this a signal that their frontier model improvements are plateauing and decided there is no value in hoarding all their compute?

▲

dktp 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I would guess it's purely because Grok isn't nearly in-demand enough to produce meaningful revenue. And they want to juice the numbers for IPO

And I'm sure it's a bonus point for Musk that it goes to OpenAI's most relevant competitor

▲

SoKamil 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

As weird as it seems I think this is Musk’s best shot at winning over Altman. He has personal vendetta.

▲

SilverElfin an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Elon got rid of most of the core xAI researchers recently. It looked like firings and he said something like Grok needs to be rewritten because it was fundamentally built in a bad way. My guess - Grok was not one of the top two models and had no traction beyond users on Twitter - so investing in it did not make sense. Or maybe he needs time to build a new team and rebuild Grok, and while he’s doing that, he needs revenue to make up for all the GPUs they bought.

Either way, I doubt he has any ‘real’ advantage in this game. It’s OpenAI and Anthropic, and then everyone else including the open weight models.

▲

tw04 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What advantage? Has there ever been any indication they’re leading in any segment? Sure Elon has thrown a bunch of money at hardware, but to what end?

And frankly as bad as Altman is from a: if AI is really going to disrupt humanity do I want this guy in charge? Elon is 10x worse. So why would the best and the brightest ever work for him?

▲

abraxas 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

No other LLM has made as much child porn as grok so there is that...

▲

eightysixfour 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In a compute starved world, big ass data centers are an advantage.

▲

loktarogar 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

yes, but it's only advantage if one is compute-strained and the other isn't. if they both have lots then there's no advantage. if one doesn't fully utilise their compute then it's not an advantage either

	▲	eightysixfour 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Well, it appears all their competitors are compute starved so…

▲

8note 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

can you elucidate what that advantage is, that isnt renting it out for the highest price to somebody that really needs it?

▲

eightysixfour 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Well, other than your ability to turn that into cash by renting it out for the highest price to someone who needs it, you can promise prospective employees that are supposed to use that infra to train models that they won’t be compute starved.

You can kick off more model training runs and experiments than your competitors.

You can kick off a $1-2t IPO claiming you are going to capture a large portion of the largest TAM the world has ever seen.

	▲	sumeno 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		They have neither the most resources nor the best models. They are mediocre at everything except the CSAM generation market, they've got that one cornered

▲

root_axis 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Training a model that is larger than your competitor's.

▲

Rover222 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The datacenter advantage, obviously

▲

Computer0 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

When did xAI have an advantage?

	▲	aurareturn 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Advantage in training compute.

▲

guluarte 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I think they overestimated the demand for Grok, which is mostly useless, and now they have too much compute on hand.

▲

bwfan123 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I see this as a huge warning sign. If a frontier ai lab is in this position of renting their own capacity, imagine how much overcapacity there is in the system.

Outside of VC money, and circular financing, the only external money coming into ai are into open-ai, and anthropic via their subscriptions and APIs.

▲

runako 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> a frontier ai lab

Wait, do people consider xAI a frontier AI lab?

	▲	londons_explore an hour ago \| parent [-]
		They were briefly SOTA on some benchmarks, although there were suggestions there might have been some massaging of the results since real world usage showed lackluster performance compared to the benchmarks.