Yes. Why do get these replies on HN that seem to only consider the most shallow, surface details? It could well be that xAI wins the AI race by betting on hardware first and foremost - new ideas are quickly copied by everyone, but a compute edge is hard to match.

The point is that it is inefficient. Others achieved similar results much cheaper, meaning they can go much further. Compute is important, but model architecture and compute methods still outweigh it.

How quickly will Grok 4/5/6 be released? Of course you can choose to keep running older GPUs for years, but if you want bleeding edge performance then you need to upgrade, so I'm not sure how many model generations the cost can really be spread over.

Also, what isn't clear is how RL-based reasoning model training compute requirements compares to earlier models. OpenAI have announced that GPT 4.5 will be their last non-reasoning model, so it seems we're definitely at a transition point now.

None of which explains this massive waste of money for zero gain.

It's not going to be from this unless it's forced upon us by the federal government. All the other companies are ahead and aren't just going to stop.

> xAI also announced a few days ago they are starting an internal video game studio.

Ha ha. I'm sure their play to claim airdrop idle game will be groundbreaking.