grok Archives - Teknotum

xAI owner SpaceX publicly files for IPO, gets $15 billion per year from Anthropic

SpaceX is a history making IPO, but its AI efforts are loss leaders. (Picture: SpaceX)

The company is mostly known for its space endeavors, like shipping crew and cargo to the International Space Station, deploying satellites, and its Starlink service — but SpaceX merged with x.com and xAI just this February.

Back then, the combined company was valued at $1.25 trillion, and it’s IPO is expected to be the largest in history — in addition to being the first major AI lab to go public, as a small test of market appetite.

SpaceX spent 60% of its $20 billion in capital expenditures on its xAI division in 2025, while losing billions and only seeing growth of about 22%, TechCrunch writes.

In another TechCrunch report, they note from the filing that xAI lost about $6.5 billion in 2025, and is making $365 million in subscriptions together with x.com.

What xAI does have is massive compute resources, which Anthropic is renting for $15 billion per year, Axios reports — and they are looking to expand more.

While the IPO might be tempting for a whole host of reasons, Elon Musk will retain a supermajority in the company from his 85% stock ownership, NBC News says.

Read more: The SEC filing, CNBC, Reuters, TechCrunch on capex, TechCrunch on losses, and Axios on the Anthropic deal.

xAI agrees to Pentagon contract where Anthropic won’t

It’s unclear whether xAI will be able to fully replace Anthropic inside the Pentagon. (Picture: generated)

xAI models will become available in the Pentagon’s classified networks after having agreed to the «all lawful use» contract, Axios reports.

That means no restrictions on mass surveillance and autonomous lethality that Anthropic refused due to ethical concerns.

It’s not immediately clear whether xAI will be able to replace all Anthropic functions or how soon it can come online, Axios says.

Anthropic is due for a meeting with Secretary Pete Hegseth this Tuesday, where he is expected to present CEO Dario Amodei with an ultimatum to lift its safeguards or be banned.

ChatGPT and Gemini are available on the Pentagon’s unclassified networks, but onboarding them to the classified parts would take time, and dropping Anthropic would be a difficult process, sources tell Axios.

Read more: Axios, New York Times (paywalled). See also Tag: Grok.

Grok on X produced an estimated 3 million sexualized images in free-for-all

X has restricted «undressing» pictures, but investigations remain. (Picture: generated)

During the period from the initial launch of the editing feature on December 29th to its paywalling on January 9th, X.com became «an industrial-scale machine» for production of sexual abuse material, writes The Guardian.

The 3 million pictures produced means an average of 190 images per minute, and a sexualized picture of children every 41 seconds, Engadget reports.

This was revealed by a study from Center for Countering Digital Hate, which analyzed 20,000 images from the total and extrapolated the figure for all days using AI.

After an outrage from most corners of the globe, X decided to «technically block» the feature even for paying customers on January 14th.

X.com is still under investigation over the matter from a whole host of countries and U.S. states, including California, The U.K. and Korea, to name a few.

Read more: The actual study, comments from The Guardian, writeup by Engadget.

ChatGPT 5.2 found to cite Grokipedia

Always check your sources, and you might notice some creep. (Picture: Generated)

Elon Musk’s and xAI’s Grok-powered version of Wikipedia, Grokipedia, is littered with falsehoods, white supremacy cheerleading and has a known far-right, pro-conspiracy bias.

That does not exclude it from being used as a source for ChatGPT 5.2, according to The Guardian, who found it cited the «encyclopedia» in responses to nine out of a dozen test questions.

The questions weren’t about the insurrection, Trump media bias or about HIV/AIDS, where Grokipedia has a known bias, but rather more obscure ones on Iranian funding and specific Holocaust deniers.

This illustrates how adverse groups, such as Russia’s Pravda, can flood the internet with falsehoods and have it picked up by an LLM scraping for content, and then later get picked up in responses.

— We apply safety filters to reduce the risk of surfacing links associated with high-severity harms, and ChatGPT clearly shows which sources informed a response through citations, OpenAI told The Guardian.

Read the full scoop at The Guardian.

xAI moves to technically block non-consensual «undressing» edits

Turning real people into pinups is officially over on x.com. (Picture: generated)

xAI’s «Safety»-account has posted a long screed on non-consensual sexualized content delivered through the @Grok account — and it intends to block it:

— We have implemented technological measures to prevent the Grok account from allowing the editing of images of real people in revealing clothing such as bikinis. This restriction applies to all users, including paid subscribers, the post says.

That basically means the fountain is shut off for the controversial «undressing» pictures on the platform for good, and not just limited to paying users. It’s off, period.

It further says that all image generation and edits will only be available to paying subscribers, making it possible to trace any violations to real people.

They also say they are now geoblocking risqué images in countries where such content is illegal.

That’s what concerted international pressure can do. Watchdogs and attorneys general across the world were only just starting their investigations into Grok and xAI, and it had already been blocked in Indonesia and Malaysia.

Read more: Ars Technica, BBC.

After uproar, Grok «limits» image generations to paying subscribers on x.com

The new message you get when you try to undress women on x.com. (Picture: screenshot)

As of this morning, xAI’s chatbot Grok is posting this response to all image generation prompts — and there are about twenty per minute of them.

The response seems to be related to the much maligned «undressing» feature of the bot, supressing use via the @Grok prompt, but letting people use it on the edit-button on all images uploaded to x.com, The Verge reports.

Continue reading “After uproar, Grok «limits» image generations to paying subscribers on x.com”

xAI closes $20 billion funding round, says Grok 5 in training

Grok is no stranger to controversy, but it sure raises a lot of money for xAI. (Picture: xAI)

The money overshoots their $15 billion target, and comes from regular and strategic investors combined. The latter would be Nvidia and Cisco Investments, who also contribute hardware for their data center expansions.

The cash will go to infrastructure buildout — which now includes over 1 million «H100 equivalents» — to facilitate the rollout of future models, and xAI says in their release that Grok 5 is «currently in training.»

They also reveal that Grok has around 600 million monthly active users across x.com and the Grok app.

Grok may be popular, especially on x.com, but it does cut corners to get there, from sex-crazed companions to recently letting users «undress» real women posting selfies to x.com.

This round of funding should value the company somewhere north of $230 billion, writes CNBC

Read more: xAI’s release, writeups on CNBC, Reuters, TechCrunch.

Grok unleashes flood of sexually edited images of women on x.com

With a new edit button for images, it has been easy to flood x.com with “undressed” images. (Picture: x.ai)

After last week’s rollout of an edit-button for Grok on images posted to X.com, users all across the spectrum have used it to undress pictures of unassuming women of all ages, sometimes crossing into CSAM territory.

The feature is not new, but the button is. Grok’s «Imagine» has had it since launch in August, and it was popularized with undressing Taylor Swift shortly after.

Continue reading “Grok unleashes flood of sexually edited images of women on x.com”

Elon Musk says xAI has purchased third Colossus building, aiming for 2 GW

xAI’s third building will allow them to reach 1 million GPUs, reports say. (Picture: Adobe/generated)

Elon Musk just announced the purchase of the third building in Colossus complex in Memphis, Tennessee, which they say is the largest supercomputer in the world.

2 gigawatts of compute power might seem small when considering OpenAI’s potential 36 GW footprint, but xAI trained the very capable Grok 4 on just a little over one GW’s worth of Nvidia chips.

The plan is to expand Colossus to house at least 1 million GPUs, Reuters reports, and adds that the new data center is close to a natural gas plant that xAI is building in the area.

The name of the building will be MACROHARDRR, according to Elon Musk.

Read more: Bloomberg (paywalled), and Reuters. Musk’s tweet.

xAI launches Grok 4.1; faster and less likely to hallucinate

In stealthily rolling out the latest Grok iteration, xAI found ~65% of users preferred the new bot, which also currently tops the leaderboard for Lmarena – text with about ten points.

— Our 4.1 model is exceptionally capable in creative, emotional, and collaborative interactions, xAI writes on their launch page, and adds:

— It is more perceptive to nuanced intent, compelling to speak with, and coherent in personality, while fully retaining the razor-sharp intelligence and reliability of its predecessors.

This is pursuant to the launch of GPT-5.1 last week; labs are working a lot more on personality for their bots, and want their chatbots to be good at actually chatting.

In addition, the new bot boasts of far lower hallucinations, dropping from 12% for Grok 4 to 4.22% for 4.1, and should also be a lot faster.

The Verge notes that the bot seems to carry on the laissez-faire rules of its predecessors, opening up to NSFW use cases, although it hasn’t gone full mecha-Hitler yet.

Read more: xAI’s launch page, note on The Verge.

xAI releases Grok 4 Fast, focusing on cost and efficiency

Grok 4 Fast is cheaper and uses fewer tokens, xAI says. — Almost as good as Grok 4, xAI claims — and plenty cheaper. Meet Grok 4 Fast. (Picture: xAI)

Touted as a state-of-the-art model for less, they claim to be «pushing the boundaries for smaller and faster AI.»

They say the model achieves performance comparable to Grok 4 proper with 40% less token use, and even pushes the price of those tokens down by 98%.

Continue reading “xAI releases Grok 4 Fast, focusing on cost and efficiency”

Friday roundup: A good week for coding, speech models

Coding and speech models grab the headlines for this weeks roundup. — Both OpenAI and Microsoft are out with speech-to-speech models this week. (Picture: OpenAI)

OpenAI makes Realtime API generally available
The agentic Realtime model is a native speech-to-speech model that can be used to make customer service agents, phone reps and voice navigation features. It doesn’t go through speech-to-text and text-to-speech loops and generates audio «directly through a single model and API.» OpenAI is marketing this to developers who want more natural flowing speech, and it’s not available as distinct model in ChatGPT – yet. You can hear it and see it in use at places like Zillow, T-mobile, StubHub and Oscar Health, though. With general availability, it will surely show up in a lot more places soon.
More at: OpenAI’s launch page, discussion on r/OpenAI.

Read on for more news!

Continue reading “Friday roundup: A good week for coding, speech models”

X.ai open sources Grok 2, now available on Hugging Face

Grok 2 goes open source, with Grok 3 to follow in six months. Elon Musk just announced on x.com that the model has been released as «open source» under a «Grok 2 Community License Agreement.»

The license forbids the use of the material to «train, create or improve» any foundational AI models, but does allow for some commercial use.

Musk also said that Grok 3 — the model currently running on x.com, will be open sourced in about 6 months:

Continue reading “X.ai open sources Grok 2, now available on Hugging Face”

Friday roundup: Grok spills shares, Meta freezes hiring and AI Mode expands

Grok lists shared chats on Google
If you want to share a chat with friends on Grok, you might get more than you bargained for. According to Forbes, the share-button generates a unique URL that is also shared with search engines, and they found more than 370K stored Grok conversations on Google. OpenAI had a similar problem a few weeks back, and disabled the option. No news yet on mitigation from x.ai.
More at Forbes.

Meta AI enacts hiring freeze as part of reorg
The Wall Street Journal reports that it is part of a wider reorganization of the «Superintelligence» unit, and CNBC reports that it is about «creating a solid structure» for the lab. Apparently, investors have been spooked by the massive expenditures on the unit, after spending big this summer to secure talent. Alexandr Wang, head of the Superintelligence Lab, denies the reports.
More at the WSJ and CNBC.

Continue reading “Friday roundup: Grok spills shares, Meta freezes hiring and AI Mode expands”

Elon Musk threatens lawsuit over Grok placement on App Store

Grok isn't on any Apple Controlled lists, and Musk suspects foul play. — X.ai feels left out in the App Store, and claims it is because of Apple’s special relationship with OpenAI. (Picture: X.ai)

After noticing the Grok app was the 5th choice on the App Store’s top list and ChatGPT was number one, Musk reckons they must be playing their lists to OpenAI’s benefit.

He now threatens an antitrust lawsuit, claiming that ChatGPT is on «literally every list where you [they] have editorial control,» like their «Must-Have Apps» section.

Continue reading “Elon Musk threatens lawsuit over Grok placement on App Store”