Comment by tristanj
16 hours ago
Bad read on the situation. xAI has too much compute and not enough customers using it. They have around half a million GPUs, some of which are stolen from Tesla, running at 11% utilization. xAI predicted more people would be using Grok, but Grok is not a SOTA model & users primarily want to use SOTA models. They have excess capacity and it makes sense to rent out GPUs to other customers while they improve their models.
Grok is also tuned to align with Musk's personal beliefs. I wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole.
I keep hearing this statement, and it always makes me wonder if people have actually used Grok…
I have a Claude Max plan I use for coding, but I also have a Grok Lite plan I use for web search type tasks (similar to Perplexity) because I like how the Grok harness handles searches and I don’t need a SOTA model for that use case. I’d never pay $30/mo for a full SuperGrok account but to me it’s worth the $10/mo for Lite as I was hitting limits on the free tier.
I’ve never noticed it to be particularly biased at least for anything I’ve been searching for on it. And on the other side, I’ve never noticed it to be particularly less censored or anything compared to other models either (also a claim I’ve heard a lot about Grok but I think because it is/was part of their marketing).
Opposed to all other models being the bastion of objectivity? Must be truly vindicating to have to hear other peoles opinions after decades in the silicon valley bubble.
There is a difference between when somebody openly instructs their model to infer disproven lies vs who doesn’t do this. And it’s quite tiring that this is even a question because of politics.
As somebody from Hungary: the biggest impact of my mood was that this kind of thinking went back with the collapse of far right there to where it belongs: to a deep hole which is not in front of normal people. Average people suddenly don’t ask illogical questions or answer stupid things because there is nobody who would tell them that they need to think stupidly, there is nobody who tell them what stupid thing they should think that week. It’s marvelous when you get the proof that the whole “stupid thinking” is completely controlled from above.
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Nobody ever said other models were bastions of objectivity. They only implied they weren't corrupted by Musk. Which is true, and which is good.
As a non-US AI user I do not particularly like using a US model following the recent political events, but I specifically do not want to use a model made by an ex-member of the current administration.
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This comment is very similar to what russian propaganda does.
It's not aimed at convincing you to support them, but to convince you everyone is lying and there is no meaningful difference between each position, so you stay apathetic.
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Why are they selling compute instead of using it to build that SOTA model?
They tried and failed. xAi made a mistake building Colossus 1 and ended up with heterogenous cluster of H100/H200/GB200 GPUs. This is a nightmare to train huge models on because each card has different specs, features, and hardware requirements. During gradient synchronization, a heterogeneous cluster would bottleneck on the slowest GPU (H100) so the faster GPUs would end up idling. They also probably ran into unexpected compatibility issues, which are difficult to resolve.
It makes more sense to use this cluster for inference, since they can segment the cluster by GPU type and avoid GPU mixing. xAI doesn't have enough inference customers so it makes sense to monetize this to companies that need inference compute such as Anthropic or Cursor.
Apparently xAI will try building SOTA models on Colossus 2, which will be built on Blackwell GPUs only.
How can something so obvious be overlooked by team building the data centre? Can't the sharding be uneven so that weaker GPUs still finish fast by taking on a smaller workload?
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It is a race that has a flywheel effect.
Once xAI training team “fix” their model, where will Anthropic be then?
More people should try Grok. I don't use it for coding but it's replaced a lot of my ChatGPT usage. Definitely more perferred model for quick questions or easy answers.
One thing I do like about Grok is that it makes it stupid easy to see what its referencing, and gives you the links to those resources. Which most models sometimes either don't bother, or don't do much of a good job of doing. It's not the top model, but it is definitely high up there, people's blind rage for anything Elon Musk is the only reason most people don't realize how capable it is unfortunately. Grok is not exclusively made by Elon Musk, there's definitely other engineers working day and night on it.
For conversational or general knowledge questions I also much prefer Grok. Musk's vanity aside, it is much less censored than the other frontier models.
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What's the blind rage, he's totally out in the open.
It's not stolen if it was taken from Tesla, investors already agreed that Elon can do anything he pleases with their money.