xAI managed to release a leading AI model in record time. Can Elon Musk dethrone ChatGPT?
xAI managed to release a leading AI model in record time. Can Elon Musk dethrone ChatGPT?
Just a few weeks after everyone freaked out about DeepSeek, Elon Musk’s Grok-3 has again shaken up the fast-moving AI race. The new model is ending the week at the top of the Chatbot Arena leaderboard, while the Grok iOS app is at the top of the App Store, just above ChatGPT. Even as Musk appears to be crashing out from his newfound political power, his xAI team has managed to deploy a leading foundational model in record time.
It’s one thing to have the leading model; it’s another to build the biggest user base around it. Musk seems to understand that if he wants to crush OpenAI, he has to shift attention away from ChatGPT. Since the debut of Grok-3, Musk has said that ChatGPT-like voice interaction and desktop apps are coming soon. Where his product roadmap appears to differ considerably from OpenAI’s is xAI’s nascent efforts to build an AI gaming studio, though the details there are scarce.
While its Deep Research reports are nowhere near as in depth as OpenAI’s, Grok-3’s “thinking” capabilities appear to be roughly on par with o1, according to Andrej Karpathy, who noted in his deep dive comparison that “this timescale to state of the art territory is unprecedented.”
Given all this, it’s probably not a coincidence that OpenAI decided this week to disclose that ChatGPT now has 400 million weekly active users — a 33 percent increase from December. Even with its many hooks into X, Grok certainly has far fewer users than that. Now, it’s a question of whether OpenAI can maintain its product lead before Grok (and others) catch up.
- Meta cuts stock refreshers, boots exec bonuses: Just as Meta employees started noticing that the company was cutting their stock refresh awards by roughly 10 percent, the company disclosed that exec bonuses were being increased from up to 75 percent of a base salary to as much as 200 percent. The vast majority of an exec’s compensation is tied to stock awards and not salary, but the timing of these changes has only contributed to growing frustration among the rank and file.
- Other headlines: Apple launched the iPhone 16E… Microsoft says it made a quantum computing breakthrough… Google started pushing people to the Gemini iOS app… GPT-4.5 could arrive as soon as next week… The Chinese government is warming up to its homegrown tech companies again.
Some noteworthy job changes in the tech world:
- Mira Murati announced her OpenAI rival, Thinking Machines Lab. Her initial team includes some heavy hitters, including John Schulman, Luke Metz, Lilian Weng, Alexander Kirillov, Barret Zoph, and Devendra Chaplot.
- Yonghui Wu, a Google fellow and VP at DeepMind, joined ByteDance to run AI research and report to CEO Liang Rubo.
- Two leaders at TikTok are leaving amid layoffs in Adam Presser’s trust and safety organization. Ole Obermann, the head of music, is reportedly headed to Apple Music. And Adrienne Lahens, head of content strategy, announced that she’s leaving.
- The cofounders of the Humane AI Pin, Bethany Bongiorno and Imran Chaudhri, are heading to HP as part of its $116 million acquisition of the failed hardware startup.
- Pinterest founder Ben Silbermann started an “audio storytelling and AI” startup called Parta.
- Jeanne DeWitt Grosser, Stripe’s chief business officer, is leaving next month.
- Anne Marshall, director of engineering for the US Digital Service, roasted DOGE on the way out.
Interview recs
- Satya Nadella went on Dwarkesh Patel’s podcast and called AGI “nonsensical benchmark hacking.” (Watch this conversation to better understand why Microsoft is distancing itself from OpenAI.)
- The New York Sun talks to Sam Bankman-Fried from prison.
- Palmer Luckey on the Shawn Ryan Show.
- Alexandr Wang with Theo Von.
- Yours truly with David Pierce on The Vergecast talking about if the metaverse is still a thing.
More links
- The Meta teams hit hardest by the last round of layoffs.
- Watch the Horizon Worlds ad that Meta pulled.
- OpenAI’s leaked spending forecast shows that SoftBank is going to become a huge part of its revenue.
- How much product managers make in the US, Canada, and Europe.
- Software engineering job openings are at a five-year low.
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