Tag: xai

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.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX merges with xAI to build data centers in space

SpaceX will now be tasked with building orbital data centers, Elon Musk says. (Picture: SpaceX)
After a tumultuous week of rumor and hearsay, Musk’s space company is merging with his artificial intelligence company — that merged with x.com in March, 2025.

Musk himself is out with a long-winded mission statement of sorts today, where he presses the need to build AI factories in space, to «harness the sun’s energy.»

Musk reckons this will be the only viable way to build data centers within 2-3 years, saying they are cheaper and more environmentally friendly, and also has plans for «self-growing bases on the Moon.»

The merger sets a new M&A record, and the new company will become the largest privately held corporation in existence, with a net worth of $1.25 trillion. There are also plans for a market debut with a value of $1.5 trillion later this year, writes Reuters.

Read more: Musk’s statement, Reuters, The Verge.

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.

Musk runs into a snag on data center gas turbines — they are now illegal

xAI fits gas turbines on flatbed trucks and calls them «temporary» to avoid regulation. No more, says the EPA. (Picture: generated)
Apparently, a new EPA rule on stationary and «temporary» gas turbines for energy generation has made them illegal, according to CNBC.

They produce much too high levels of nitrogen oxides, and must be regulated as combustion engines, the EPA says.

That means Musk’s and xAI’s Colossus plant will have to rethink their energy use, as they make widespread use of natural gas turbines to generate electricity for their facilities.

They will basically have to get Clean Air Act permits, and prove they aren’t harmful.

The local population have long been complaining of a rotten-egg-like stench in the atmosphere, CNBC writes, and smog is supposedly prevalent.

xAI uses 15 turbines for Colossus 1 and at one point had 59 turbines for Colossus 2, The Guardian writes.

Read more: The EPA Rule. Writeups on CNBC, Gizmodo and 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

(Picture: generated)
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”

Short Friday news; Meta’s bias checker, how to deal with children, Gemini’s new memory, and more

Metas new bias-chief is a right wing influencer who crusaded against DEI politicies
Generated picture.
Meta’s new «bias»-checker is a right-wing influencer
Robby Starbuck rose to fame as an influencer campaigning against Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) in the USA. He often sued companies to force them to end such policies, and even sued Meta after their AI wrongly implicated him in the events of January 6.

Now the suit is settled and he has a new job offer; as a Meta advisor to address «ideological and political bias» in their AIs. This is what Trump meant when he went against «woke» AI, and Meta says they have made «tremendous strides to improve the accuracy of Meta AI and mitigate ideological and political bias» since working with Starbuck.
More at The WSJ, The Verge, Mashable and MSNBC.

Gemini now defaults to remembering previous chats
Google Gemini’s new feature is always on by design, and will remember your older chats without specifically asking. The feature delivers «more personalized responses the more you use it,» Google says. It will remember «key details and preferences you’ve shared, leading to more natural and relevant conversations, as if you’re collaborating with a partner who’s already up to speed.»

It can be turned off by going to Settings, then «Personal context.» There is also an option called «Temporary Chats» that won’t be remembered.
More at Google’s launch post, The Verge and 9to5Google.

Continue reading “Short Friday news; Meta’s bias checker, how to deal with children, Gemini’s new memory, and more”

So, who really has the most GPUs in the AI race?

AI companies are investing greatly in GPUs and its hard to catch up. Here's what we know so far.
According to this chart, the best compute units are GPUs, by far — and those green dots are all made by Nvidia. (Picture: Steve Jurvetson, CC BY 2.0)
Sam Altman says OpenAI will deploy more than a million GPUs by the end of the year. Meta says it’ll beat that. Elon says xAI is building the world’s biggest AI supercomputer.

But here’s the truth: None of these numbers are easy to verify — and each company counts differently.

Continue reading “So, who really has the most GPUs in the AI race?”