The Archive

Proposes metric for evaluating XAI methods via continuous input perturbation, assessing sufficiency and necessity without ground-truth labels.

Preregistered study (N=418) on skin-lesion classification shows exposing model limitations helps calibrate user trust with actual performance.

xAI launches persistent skills for Grok across web, iOS, Android enabling document generation, workflow automation, and custom skill sharing.

xAI's Grok integrates with Nous Research's open-source Hermes agent framework for multi-tool agentic workflows.

More than 50 employees have reportedly left Elon Musk’s newly merged SpaceXAI since February, raising questions about burnout, leadership changes, talent poaching, and whether liquidity events weakened retention incentives.

xAI launches Grok Build, a terminal-based coding agent in early beta for SuperGrok Heavy subscribers.

Gas turbines at xAI's Colossus 2 data center have drawn a lawsuit over the company's use of "mobile" gas turbines as power plants.

Meta announced on Tuesday that it's testing a Threads feature that lets users tag a Meta AI account to get answers to questions or context about a conversation on the platform. If you've spent any time looking at replies on X as of late, this new feature sounds a lot like Meta's take on people tagging xAI's Grok. But, as reported by Engadget, Threads users quickly discovered that you can't block the new Meta AI account, and they aren't happy about it. Meta has invested heavily in AI as it works to catch up to rivals like OpenAI and Google, spending billions to hire AI talent. It launched a ne...

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has begun his testimony against Elon Musk in a high-profile jury trial in a California federal courtroom. Altman, alongside OpenAI president Greg Brockman, is a primary defendant in the trial brought by Musk. Altman, Brockman, and Musk were all part of the initial founding team at OpenAI, with Musk investing up to $38 million in the ChatGPT-maker's early days. But the relationship between Musk and other OpenAI founders eventually soured, and Musk stepped away from the company, later going on to found his own direct competitor, xAI. In recent years, Musk and Altman have t...

Link: techcrunch.com

Stratechery opinion: Elon Musk's dual involvement in SpaceX and xAI mirrors Anthropic's structure; argues Musk should focus xAI on B2B services.

On the latest episode of the Equity podcast, we discussed what xAI's deal with Anthropic might mean for parent company SpaceX.

Anthropic partners with SpaceX/xAI to use full Colossus data center capacity; facility faces environmental compliance concerns over unpermitted gas turbines.

Anthropic secures 300MW, $5B/year compute deal with SpaceX for Colossus I cluster; ARR growth tracking 8000% annualized.

xAI's real business may be more about building data centers than training AI models.

Reddit speculation that xAI will dissolve as a separate entity; unconfirmed claim lacking official sources or detail.

Just a reminder that the data centre announced to be used is the one xAI installed a massive amount of toxic gas turbines to power it, which is illegal and deadly to the local area.

Reddit speculation that Elon/xAI rented GPUs to Anthropic, interpreted as signal of competitive pressure and capacity constraints.

SpaceX, Elon Musk's space company that also houses his AI company, xAI, is considering spending $55 billion, at least initially, to build a semiconductor factory in Texas, according to a filing with Grimes County.

https://x.ai/news/anthropic-compute-partnership

xAI launches Connectors for Grok Web, enabling integrations with third-party apps within the chat interface.

xAI's Colossus 1 compute cluster now accessible to Anthropic for model training and inference.

xAI launches Grok Imagine Quality Mode API with improved image realism, text rendering, and creative control.

Google DeepMind, Microsoft, and Elon Musk's xAI have agreed to allow the US government to review new AI models before they're released to the public. In an announcement on Tuesday, the Commerce Department's Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) says it will work with the AI companies to perform "pre-deployment evaluations and targeted research to better assess frontier AI capabilities." CAISI, which started evaluating models from OpenAI and Anthropic in 2024, says it has performed 40 reviews so far. Both companies "have renegotiated their existing partnerships with the center to bett...

In the first week of the landmark trial between Elon Musk and OpenAI, Musk took the stand in a crisp black suit and tie and argued that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and president Greg Brockman had deceived him into bankrolling the company. Along the way, he warned that AI could destroy us all and sat…

The Pentagon has struck deals with OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia, Elon Musk's xAI, and the startup Reflection, allowing the agency to use their AI tools in classified settings, according to an announcement on Friday. At the same time, the Defense Department has left out Anthropic - which it previously used for classified information - after declaring it a supply-chain risk. This builds upon deals with OpenAI and xAI, which have already reached agreements with the Pentagon for the "lawful" use of their AI systems. A report from The Information suggests Google has struck a similar a...

Elon Musk confirms xAI used distillation from OpenAI models to train Grok, raising questions about training data sourcing practices.

In a federal courtroom in California on Thursday, Elon Musk testified that his own AI startup, xAI, has used OpenAI's models to improve its own. The matter at question is model distillation, a common industry practice by which one larger AI model acts as a "teacher" of sorts to pass on knowledge to a smaller AI model, the "student." Although it's often used legitimately within companies using one of their own AI models to train another, it's also a practice that's sometimes used by smaller AI labs to try to get their models to mimic the performance of a larger competitor's model. Asked on the...

"Distillation" is a hot topic as frontier labs try to prevent smaller competitors from copying their models.

Court filing alleges xAI distilled OpenAI models; significant if verified but requires legal context confirmation.