news

한어Русский языкEnglishFrançaisIndonesianSanskrit日本語DeutschPortuguêsΕλληνικάespañolItalianoSuomalainenLatina

Zhidongxi (public account:zhidxcom）
Compilevanilla
editYunpeng

Zhidongxi reported on August 13 that after 4 months, Grok 2 is finally here!

Yesterday, Musk announced on the social platform X that the Grok 2 beta version will be released soon, and posted a picture of a Grok robot wearing a big gold chain and smoking a cigar, which looked very cool.

▲ Musk previews Grok 2

This is one of ChatGPT's strongest rivals. Grok is a chatbot developed by Musk's big model startup xAI, which was first launched in November last year. In April this year, xAI launched the multimodal big model Grok-1.5V, officially joining the arms race of cutting-edge multimodal big models. This time, Grok 2 will return with voice functions to challenge GPT-4o.

Grok is coming on strong, but at the same time, Musk's "partiality" towards xAI has also aroused dissatisfaction among investors. At least three Tesla shareholders have filed lawsuits, claiming that the transfer of resources to xAI has harmed their rights and interests.

Public information shows that xAI has hired at least 11 Tesla employees, including 6 from the autonomous driving team. Musk also used Tesla's GPU and a large amount of visual data for xAI model training. All signs indicate that Musk is shifting the focus of his "business empire" resources toward xAI.

xAI was founded in July last year and raised a huge amount of financing of US$6 billion (approximately RMB 43.5 billion) in May this year. Its valuation directly exceeded US$24 billion, making it the second highest valued AI startup after OpenAI.

1. Talent, chips, and funds, Musk transferred resources toxAI

Musk has a huge "business empire". In addition to xAI, he also owns many companies, including electric car company Tesla, space transportation startup SpaceX, brain-computer interface startup Neuralink, social media platform X, etc. And all signs show that he has a "grand" plan for xAI and is transferring the resources of various companies to xAI.

“xAI is a fairly new company, so we have a lot of catching up to do compared to companies that have been around for five, 10, or 20 years,” Musk said in an interview with Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson last month.

So far, xAI has hired at least 11 Tesla employees, including six from the self-driving team, which is focused on AI-driven self-driving technology that Musk has called critical to Tesla's future.

Regarding the flow of talent, he said hiring xAI employees from his other companies is a way to "prevent valuable engineers from going to competitors."

Musk also reallocated the GPUs reserved for Tesla to xAI and X. His explanation for this was: "Tesla has nowhere to use Nvidia's chips, they will just pile up in the warehouse."

▲Musk responded to Tesla GPU reallocation

The large amount of visual data collected by Tesla can be used as a resource to train xAI models. In last month's earnings call, Musk said: "Tesla has learned a lot from xAI. This will help advance fully autonomous driving and help build new Tesla data centers."

xAI also rents GPUs from X and has access to X's real-time data.

According to foreign media reports citing people familiar with the matter, X has contributed $250 million worth of computing power to xAI, whose chatbot Grok is only available by subscription on X. At the same time, xAI engineers are tasked with fixing X's problems and using xAI's models to improve X's functionality.

In March, Igor Babuschkin, one of xAI’s chief engineers, called integrating Grok into X “a good option.”

Musk also used xAI’s connections with other companies to solicit investment. Some xAI investors revealed that they were told that xAI could use data from Musk’s other businesses to train its large language models, and these connections were part of the factor that attracted them to invest.

Musk has been questioned by investors for his management style of the company before. However, due to the optimistic performance of Tesla and SpaceX, some investors who support xAI said that they hope to get a share of SpaceX and other companies themselves, or the "next SpaceX" by funding Musk's latest project.

Musk has also been promoting potential collaborations between his different companies. In July, he posted a poll on X asking users whether Tesla should invest $5 billion in xAI, saying it was only “to test the waters, as any such move would require board and shareholder approval.”

▲Musk launched a poll

"It looks like the public is in favor, I will discuss this with the Tesla board," Musk said after X users voted 67.9 percent in favor of the move.

2. Being sued by multiple shareholders, the transfer of assets is not a "first offense"

Tesla and xAI each have different AI ambitions, which puts the two companies in an awkward position as they compete for resources. In addition to selling electric cars, Tesla is also developing fully self-driving software and humanoid robots.

▲Tesla electric car (Photo source: Vincent Isore/Zuma Press)

Some investors worry that as Musk shifts resources such as talent and hardware to xAI, these other businesses will suffer. Although Musk has said that this sharing benefits investors in all his companies, his approach has triggered investor lawsuits and has been used as an argument against Tesla's multi-billion dollar compensation package for him.

At least three Tesla shareholders have filed lawsuits alleging that the shift to xAI harmed their interests. Those cases are currently pending.

The lawsuits accuse Musk of violating his fiduciary duties by transferring resources such as talent to xAI, seeking damages and requiring Musk to transfer his equity in xAI to Tesla. For example, one of the shareholder lawsuits targets the reallocation of GPUs between the two companies, and the complaint states: "Musk is creating tremendous value in xAI, but at the expense of Tesla."

▲xAI homepage (Source: Gabby Jones/Bloomberg)

Musk does not own a majority stake in publicly traded Tesla, and while his other private companies may have more leeway, he still has a responsibility to their investors.

The difference is that investors in these companies are less likely to take legal action against him. After all, for a private company with perhaps only 10 shareholders, all of whom know each other, a phone call might be enough to resolve the issue.

Brian Quinn, a law professor at Boston College, believes that Musk's various asset transfers are problematic. "Every time he 'plays' with the resources of these companies, he is handling other people's money. He cannot regard all assets as his own personal assets."

“The law doesn’t prohibit people from having fiduciary duties to multiple companies, but it does prohibit behavior that benefits one company at the expense of another,” said Scott Cummings, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

In fact, this is not the first time that Musk has transferred resources between his different companies. Over the years, he has used his multiple companies to help each other, including space transportation startup SpaceX, brain-computer interface company Neuralink, tunnel manufacturer Boring, social platform X, car company Tesla, and xAI.

In 2022, Musk acquired the company, then known as Twitter, and subsequently brought in employees from all over his "business empire" to help with the transition. In court testimony, Musk described Tesla engineers as "voluntarily helping out briefly after get off work."

3. Grok is second only to OpenAI in valuation and is a strong rival to ChatGPT

Founded in July last year, xAI has surpassed a valuation of $24 billion in just one year, becoming the second most valuable AI startup after OpenAI.

The founder’s halo is certainly dazzling, but on the other hand, the rapid development of xAI is also inseparable from the product itself.

Last November, xAI, which was founded only four months ago, launched its first chatbot Grok, whose underlying model is xAI's self-developed Grok-1.

According to reports, xAI first trained a prototype large model Grok-0 with 33 billion parameters. After two months of iteration, Grok-1 was finally born. Its evaluation benchmark score was higher than Llama 2 70B and GPT-3.5, but there was a certain gap compared to GPT-4.

Grok is not about powerful performance, but about being humorous and responsive. Unlike traditional chatbots such as ChatGPT, its style is as "rebellious" as Musk himself, and it will answer some "tough" questions that other AIs will most likely refuse to answer - such as telling you seriously how to make cocaine, and listing the detailed steps.

▲Musk shared a screenshot of Grok’s answer

In March of this year, after repeatedly accusing OpenAI of not being "open" enough, Musk announced that Grok-1 would be open source, directly releasing the basic model weights and network architecture. Subsequently, within a month, he released new versions Grok-1.5 and the multimodal large model Grok-1.5V.

▲Grok-1.5V looks at the picture and writes code

Compared with cutting-edge models such as GPT-4V and Claude 3, Grok-1.5V performs on par and slightly better in some benchmarks.

▲Grok-1.5V evaluation benchmark

In the release announcement of Grok-1.5V, xAI wrote that in the coming months, it is expected to significantly improve multimodal understanding and generation capabilities in various modalities such as images, audio and video.

At the moment, it looks like Grok 2 will at least have audio capabilities. Aravind Srinivas, CEO of AI search startup Perplexity, asked during a preview of Grok 2 if it would have "Feynman's voice," and Musk was certain.

▲ Musk previews Grok 2's voice capabilities

Conclusion: Musk's "business empire" resources are tilted

When one person owns multiple companies, it's not illegal in itself to share resources between them, provided each entity is fairly compensated. But the practice is rare among large companies and is considered fraught with problems by legal experts because it can lead CEOs to make decisions for the benefit of one company at the expense of another.

Musk has made no secret of his preference for xAI when running his own "business empire". With such a resource tilt, we will have to wait and see what kind of results Grok 2 can deliver.

Source: The Wall Street Journal