I wonder if they do have non-commodity AI capabilities, just, ones that don’t translate into a world-class frontier model.

Like they might have hired really good AI infra folks, gotten really good uptimes on their nodes, gotten folks who really know how to configure Infiniband (or whatever). But then, didn’t find the folks who knew what to run on that infrastructure. Or maybe Grok just had too much political drama around it.

Maybe they have something else im the books, I truly have no idea. But once you get down from the top rung of full-bandwidth cross section networking at the 100k node networking scale "AI" infra, theres no shortage of people who can do that. Most importantly, labor isn't the big chunk of the outlay. Even if they have 50 engineers clearing $1m/yr, that's pocket change for everything else

EDIT: said 50 engineers at $50m/yr originally and meant 50 @ $1m/yr