xAI’s Next-Gen AI Model

The list of flagship AI models that missed their promised launch windows continues to grow.

Last summer, billionaire Elon Musk, the founder and CEO of AI company xAI, said that Grok 3, xAI’s next central AI model, would arrive by the “end of year” 2024. Grok, xAI’s answer to models like OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Google’s Gemini, can analyze images and respond to questions and powers several features on X, Musk’s social network.

“Grok 3 end of year after training on 100k H100s should be really something special,” Musk wrote in a July post on X, referring to xAI’s enormous Memphis-based cluster of GPUs. “Grok 3 will be a major leap forward,” he said in a mid-December follow-up post.

Yet it’s January 2, and Grok 3 hasn’t arrived — nor are there signs its rollout is imminent.

Some code on xAI’s website spotted by AI tipster Tibor Blaho suggests that an intermediate “Grok 2.5” model may land first.

To be fair, in an interview with podcaster Lex Fridman in August, Musk said that Grok 3 would “hopefully” be available in 2024 “if we’re lucky.”

But Grok 3’s MIA status is interesting because it’s part of a growing trend.

Last year, AI startup Anthropic failed to deliver a successor to its top-of-the-line Claude 3 Opus model. Months after announcing that a next-gen model, Claude 3.5 Opus, would be released by the end of 2024, Anthropic scrapped all mention of the model from its developer documentation. (According to one report, Anthropic finished training Claude 3.5 Opus sometime last year but decided that releasing it didn’t make economic sense.)

In recent months, Google and OpenAI have also suffered setbacks with their flagship models.

This could be evidence of the limitations of current AI scaling laws — the methods companies use to increase their models’ capabilities. In the not-too-distant past, it was possible to achieve substantial performance boosts by training models using massive amounts of computing power and larger and larger data sets. However, the gains with each generation of models have begun to shrink, leading companies to pursue alternative techniques.

“You’re hoping for [Grok 3] to be state-of-the-art?” Fridman asked.

“Hopefully,” Musk replied. “I mean, this is the goal. We may fail at this goal. That’s the aspiration.”

There could be other reasons for Grok 3’s delay. xAI has a much smaller team than many of its rivals. Nonetheless, the slipped launch time frame proves that conventional AI training approaches are running up against a wall.