[bfeynman]

That only seems plausible if whatever corpse of xAI is around is giving them engineering time. I don't know if they hired a bunch of ex frontier lab staff but its unlikely they have the technical capability to train their own frontier models especially the pretraining. Because the thing is if its not competitive with claude/codex it will be panned.

[vessenes]

Hmm, I read the situation a little differently. Grok is not a slouchy model. It’s not the best, but it’s not the worst. X currently has one source of proprietary data, Twitter, and grok is by far the best at all the things you might imagine there - today’s zeitgeist, who’s saying what, current news, etc.

Cursor adds in a large corpus of proprietary coding data — I think this is actually fairly hard to acquire right now, because claude and codex are so good.

I bet there’s enough talent at the Grok team to work with the cursor team and data to get something good out the door.

That said, I don’t track Grok’s engineering leads — I’m not sure who’s currently around, and who is not.

[ccimmergreen]

Unlikely, given that large swathes of talent have already left xAI, ostensibly due to poor leadership management. Simply throwing money in to build the biggest datacenters in the world doesn't do much good without bright minds to back it up. https://www.fastcompany.com/91531084/inside-the-xai-exodus

[vessenes]

Be careful taking the headlines at face value - that list of people leaving was mostly product and redundant senior execs to my eyes, post spacex merger. You’d expect those folks to be asked to leave as part of a re-org in any event. I don’t think it’s dispositive one way or the other on the tech org.

[ccimmergreen]

You are wrong, they were not redundant execs.

They were world-class senior developers and AI engineers most renowned in the AI research communities (e.g. Jimmy Ba the legend, Christian Szegedy, Igor Babuschkin, Greg Yang), poached from other companies to join xAI and they were getting very high salaries.

The mass exodus has been happening way before spacex merger though.

[vessenes]

Interesting. Agreed that’s a significant list.

Post model 3 launch, Tesla had a number of senior folks leave almost immediately. My read at that time was they had hit or exceeded pareto-optimal on the suffering:wealth scale —- Tesla was clearly going to make it, and they had already vested 90% of the value they’d receive from Tesla ownership: why go suffer through the massive build out?

And in fact, in that era, Tesla did bring in a bunch of auto industry types to help scale, who as it happens also certainly did very well, but order of magnitude less well than the early peeps.

There might be some similar economics here: change of control will often fully vest early founders. Combined with incoming SX IPO, these guys are done financially — as in, already multibillionaires pre-IPO. You’d have to want to stay and the company would have to really want you to stay as well before it made economic sense to re-up.

People say a lot of things about working for Elon; things like “hardest work I ever did,” and “he made me extremely rich”, but you don’t read “that was easy” very often.

I have no idea if there’s enough talent right now at xAI to go build a foundation model, but in the immortal worlds of Carl Icahn: “don’t bet against Elon”

[zxspectrum1982]

There's been also a lot of good talent joining xAI lately.