TIL: xAI burn rate

[timelets]

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI is burning through $1 billion a month as the cost of building its advanced AI models

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-17/musk-s-xai-burning-through-1-billion-a-month-as-costs-pile-up

Comments

[dmm]

oh, users are very different; people are still evaluating; we'll have a better picture in a few days

preliminary indications are that it's great in math and reasoning, but not so much in coding (surprisingly) or in writing

also it knows how to score super on tests in physics, but not necessarily on a more deep understanding of physics (this one is something none of the models seem to do well yet)

anyway, if no one summarizes the results earlier, Zvi will surely get a good summary to us next Thursday in his next weekly AI review (following this one: https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/FczrW2kQ7WxGW39Yv/ai-124-grokless-interlude) at the latest

[timelets]

The latest version of Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok is echoing the views of its billionaire creator, so much so that it will sometimes search online for Musk’s stance on an issue before offering up an opinion.

The unusual behavior of Grok 4, the AI model that Musk’s company xAI released late Wednesday, has surprised some experts.
...
“It’s extraordinary,” said Simon Willison, an independent AI researcher who’s been testing the tool. “You can ask it a sort of pointed question that is around controversial topics. And then you can watch it literally do a search on X for what Elon Musk said about this, as part of its research into how it should reply.”

[dmm]

I know. Now people are going to investigate if it was explicitly instructed to do so (which would be pretty bad), or whether it is a side effect of their training process (which would be interesting):

https://x.com/TheZvi/status/1943439850608431388

[timelets]

He's going to shove his opinions down everybody's throat for as long as he's in charge. He's done that when he bought twitter and he's doing it now.

[dmm]

On Twitter, not really. He tried a bit, mostly caused people to laugh at him (while being quite mad at him, and rightly so), and more or less stopped.

I am using Twitter all the time, and I don't see much traces of Musk (although a bit too much of his crowd, not in my feeds, but in those stupid "trending things" (I still have not figured out how to block politics and sport from "trending" words shown to me)).

[timelets]

He is a repeat offender. When he bought twitter he made engineers insert his tweets into millions of feeds. I, personally, had to block him, as did many other people. After seeing that users are blocking him, they tweaked the algorithms to promote feeds that engage with his tweets and demote those that don't. It's disgusting.

[dmm]

Elon's behavior is quite disgusting along multiple dimensions...

But this effect you are talking about was not pronounced enough for me to notice; I only knew about it because people were discussing that. My feeds were always free of all those people.

I am way more concerned about technical degradation of Twitter (and about the even more pronounced technical degradation of Facebook, and general enshittification of more-or-less everything, so that's not really all that Elon-specific)...