The Scene
In the event you imagine what you examine Elon Musk — and typically on Musk’s personal X account — you’d assume the typically world’s richest man had misplaced his marbles and was in deep trouble.
However whilst he lives in a wild spectacle of politics and controversy, Musk has vaulted right into a severe, aggressive place within the AI race, a transfer that would enhance the fortunes of his different companies within the course of.
The information factors are concrete. In somewhat greater than a yr, his xAI firm went from not current to constructing what might be the world’s strongest AI datacenter. And his pursuit of turning Teslas into robotaxis, which seemed like a fantasy a yr or two in the past, is out of the blue no less than within the realm of chance.
Musk missed out on getting a first-mover benefit within the generative AI period. After attempting unsuccessfully to take over and run OpenAI, which he co-founded as a nonprofit, he walked away, years earlier than OpenAI would launch ChatGPT.
However the subsequent wave performs to the strengths Musk has displayed within the automotive and house industries. The AI business is going through huge, advanced logistical hurdles like producing sufficient power to energy cities and getting a whole lot of 1000’s of graphics processors to work in unison with out, actually, melting.
And so most unbiased opponents to OpenAI have folded, scared away by the billion-dollar value tags and inherent uncertainty.
It’s a problem made for Musk, whose will is matched by his entry to capital and his potential to persuade good younger engineers to work themselves into the bottom in pursuit of the not possible.
xAI constructed a datacenter in Memphis, Tennessee with 100,000 GPUs that Musk says are actually operational, with one other 100,000 on the best way. Which may be an exaggeration, as the ability calls for alone most likely make it not possible to make use of all 100,000 of these GPUs at this time.
Microsoft’s datacenter utilized by OpenAI is believed to be the subsequent largest on the earth, however its actual dimension hasn’t been disclosed.
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Musk has referred to as the datacenter in Memphis the most important on the earth by far, and mentioned it will likely be used to coach Grok 3, claiming it will likely be probably the most highly effective AI chatbot on the earth by December.
Musk has achieved this in a document time of 121 days, and has damaged all kinds of guidelines and norms in his relentless effort to catch as much as OpenAI, the corporate he based and now bitterly despises.
Exhibit A: Musk refused to attend for the ability hookups to run his datacenter, so he put in 20 pure gas-powered generators able to powering 50,000 properties, not even bothering to apply for permits. The transfer has raised issues of air air pollution, resulting in a spate of dangerous press.
Musk seems to not care, and doubtless figured that by the point his generators get shut down, he might need secured the required power by way of the standard grid.
“Our basic competitiveness depends upon being sooner than some other AI firm. That is the one approach to catch up,” Musk wrote on X.
Distinction Musk’s strategy with that of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who’s trying to build a world coalition of governments to help the infrastructure vital to construct the insanely massive knowledge facilities vital for the subsequent leap in AI functionality.
Musk’s early success in constructing his Memphis GPU cluster has nervous Altman, who, in line with latest reporting in The Data, believes Musk may quickly have entry to extra compute energy than OpenAI and Microsoft.
On Thursday, LinkedIn co founder Reid Hoffman, who helped discovered OpenAI, mentioned Musk continues to be enjoying catch up. “I don’t assume it’s essentially [that] he’s within the lead,” Hoffman mentioned, talking at The Data’s AI summit.
Reed’s view
This transfer by Musk is dangerous. There’s no assure that constructing datacenters of this dimension will yield magical outcomes.
However there’s little doubt Musk will preserve attempting so long as he believes it might work. He was prepared to guess his whole fortune on the corporate that finally grew to become PayPal. And he was prepared to guess his PayPal fortune on SpaceX, an audacious concept on the time.
If xAI achieves an AI mannequin that may cause in addition to a human, or one thing near “Synthetic Basic Intelligence,” it may energy the autonomous driving skills of Teslas and the humanoid robotic that the automaker can be trying to construct.
Musk’s Neuralink, maker of experimental mind implant expertise that has to date enabled two sufferers to play videogames with their minds, may additionally profit from the AI he’s constructing in Memphis.
After which there’s Grok, xAI’s chatbot that’s nonetheless mediocre in comparison with its opponents like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini.
X might by no means regain the advertisers it had when it was referred to as Twitter, however its consumer base should still show beneficial as a distribution channel for Grok, which has unique entry to the content material on X.
In fact, like several effort of such outsized ambition, it may fail. Musk may by no means catch as much as OpenAI. His plan may crash and burn. And if his AI guess fails, his empire might crumble.
But it surely may succeed. Whereas no person within the anti-Musk tribe desires to listen to this, he may have the final chuckle.
