Harry Booth
It’s been a big year for Elon Musk, even by Musk standards. In 2024, his company xAI transformed an abandoned Electrolux factory in Memphis into “Colossus,” the world’s largest supercomputer in 122 days—then quickly doubled the number of Nvidia graphics processing units inside to 200,000. In February, xAI released Grok 3, soon followed by Grok 4 in July, which it called the smartest AI in the world.
“With respect to academic questions, Grok 4 is better than PhD level in every subject, no exceptions,” Musk said at its launch. Whereas previous versions of Grok lagged slightly behind state-of-the-art models, Grok 4 bested rival chatbots on several industry benchmarks, including scoring 88.4% on a Graduate-Level Google-Proof Q&A (GPQA), a collection of graduate-level science questions on which PhD students typically average 65%. Though benchmarks can be imperfect measures of real-world performance. “At times, it may lack common sense, and it has not yet invented new technologies or discovered new physics, but that is just a matter of time,” Musk added.
Musk founded xAI in 2023 to offer an alternative to OpenAI, an organization he helped found in 2015, but whose ChatGPT he has called “woke.” Joining the AI race later than its rivals, xAI has spent aggressively to compete, raising $10 billion in July in debt and equity, which included a reported $2 billion from Musk’s SpaceX. The Financial Times reported later that month that xAI is seeking to raise more in a deal that could value the firm at up to $200 billion. Musk has denied that he is fundraising.
That pace of process, and Grok’s integration into Musk’s social platform, X, has helped the chatbot amass at least 35.1 million monthly active users, though this lags behind ChatGPT’s 700 million per week and Google Gemini’s 450 million per month. Soon after Grok 4’s release, the company also announced a near-$200 million contract with the U.S. Department of Defense to develop tech tools for America’s military.
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