So, a guy with probably one of the largest incentives in the world to trash xAI is trashing xAI?

The information content of this is rather minimal. Even if everything he says is literally true it's hard to tell through the massive, massive vested interest he has.

And it doesn't help that...

'Hoffman, who is an investor in both Anthropic and OpenAI, pushed back firmly on the narrative that the two companies are in a zero-sum race. “We tend to want to tell these stories as cage matches,” he said, as in two companies enter and only one leaves, but “in fact,” he claimed, “there’s a lot of room for both of them to win incredibly.'

that's clearly a very self-interested gloss on the flip side of the situation. Yes, that's in the possibility space. No, I would not consider "both companies do fantastically for many many years" as a terribly large part of the possibility space. Look to all of the many past instances of industries starting up. It is a very common case that if you take the two early leaders you aren't looking at who is going to be the two biggest companies in 10 or 20 years. It is in fact a common case that neither of those companies are the leaders in 10 or 20 years. The sheer staggering size of the AI training moat at the current time may lock in the possibility that no other business could possibly overtake them... but what if somebody solves that massive training gap? It probably isn't mathematically fundamental; I can't help but observe that humans do not get to their level of capability by pouring the entire Internet through their head several times.

He probably does know a lot of things most of us don't know, but I doubt he's sharing very many of them in this article. This is just trash talk.

The AI labs have somewhat the same problem that publishers have. Essentially their asset is a static piece of IP: a huge file full of numbers. They’re like a publisher only letting you read their book through some scuzzy Flash reader UI because they have to protect that file at all costs. At some point the weights get out/get reproduced and then what they have a is bunch of sunk costs.

Is xAI being used by any professionals? I see them acting as a data center rental service for the others, but that doesn’t justify their valuation imo. They seem to be behind on everything and don’t seem to have any relevance. The cursor purchase may change that but for how long?

> So, a guy with probably one of the largest incentives in the world to trash xAI is trashing xAI?

Why not? The guy with probably one of the largest incentives in the world to NOT trash xAI was trashing xAI.

There is also a political aspect to this. Reid Hoffman is a big democrat donor and hater of Trump, going so far as to funding a law change so Trump could be privately prosecuted for sex offences in New York.

Which is ironic, because Reid was a friend of Epstein and visited his island.

>So, a guy with probably one of the largest incentives in the world to trash xAI is trashing xAI?

He's just stating the obvious, so I really don't see this as contentious.

xAI is irrelevant. It's so irrelevant that after being relegated hardware from Tesla, then pushed into Twitter to try to make that have value, then pushed into SpaceX because Elon Musk somehow gets away with hilarious levels of securities fraud, now it's basically reduced to renting out hardware.

Yes, xAI is irrelevant, and Hoffman is just pointing out the blatantly obvious. Its only value is in renting out hardware that can be better used by more capable orgs. It is basically a scalper that happened to get loads of nvidia hardware pre-orders in just before the AI run-up, and the entire SPCX scam relies upon everyone trying to buy usage of it.

> This is just trash talk.

Trash talk is Musk's entire M.O., so that seems like a good way to proceed in 2026.