How will the next generation of Grok compare to other frontier models on the market? We will have to see what Meta, Google, and OpenAi bring out along with xAI.
That said, we can make some projections as to how things will unfold. When it comes to one of the key components, data, the social media platforms have a powerful advantage. This puts xAI, Google, and Meta at the head of the class.
Which brings up the other two areas: compute and training.
Here is where Grok might be able to leap the rest of the market.
The user experience appears to be favorable for Grok from what I read. I have not used this model so cannot add any personal insight.
What stands out to me with xAI is the fact we are dealing with a company that is a little more than 18 months. As compared to the others in the market, xAI had to play catch up. There are not a lot of people who put Grok in the lead. By the same token, most have it bunched with the pack.
That means a lot of the gap was closed.
So what is it going to take to get Grok to the lead? We might have our answer in a move that xAI recently made.
At present, xAI has the largest cluster on the planet. The company brought over 100K GPUs online earlier this year. The goal is to double the compute in 2025.
This was accomplished by securing a billion order from NVIDIA. Elon Musk was able to get priority status from Jensen Huang on the Blackwell line of GPUs.
Huang has repeatedly stated that he is going to give preference to those who prove they can get the servers online quickly. The fact that xAI got the first cluster up in under 4 months (from start to finish).
NVIDIA’s GB200 AI servers are made by Foxconn. The chip company is expected to start the servers’ deliveries by January 2025, and Elon Musk just nabbed a priority spot for xAI, reported DigiTimes.
Musk reportedly approached NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang directly about xAI’s GB200 server orders. Getting priority access to NVIDIA’s GB200 AI servers aligns with Musk’s goals for xAI.
We know the daily data that is generated by X. Each month, there are roughly 600 million users feeding xAI servers with multimodal data. With the addition of this compute, the company is looking at pushing Grok to the forefront of frontier models.
This could be enhanced with the development of a frontend that will allow anyone to use the model. We can expect tiered level use options, similar to what other companies are doing.
With this move, it puts all the components in place.
Compute is the name of the game. Sam Altman stated that the holdup with a number of the applications is a lack of compute. On this issue, xAI is solving the problem.
With the Blackwell chips expected to ship in January, we could see a 200K cluster with xAI by the Summer.
That will give them a lot more training time as compared to the other companies. Here is why speed to set up is key.
xAI might have been late to the game but we could see them making a case for the lead by the middle of 2025.
