Elon Musk’s xAI and the Magnificent Seven Compete for AI Dominance
The fight for frozen Olympus has never been fiercer – and our tech titans aren’t waiting around. The search for the optimal combination of skills, entities and insights continues.
The high-tech race for global superintelligence is coming down to The Magnificent Seven – the artificial intelligence arms races of Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Meta, Nvidia and OpenAI.
Supercomputers – and the chips that run them – power every tier of AI deployment.
Each of the Magnificent Seven maximises its strengths and pushes the technological envelope to the limit with an AI-obsessed arms race. Recently, Elon Musk’s xAI rocketed to the start – and got an investment from the Silicon Valley venture capitalists Lightspeed Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital and Tribe Capital.
Elon Musk's xAI: A New Challenger
xAI featured on the cover of Time magazine last month, just how serious is xAI? Musk’s start-up is closing on raising around $6 billion in a funding round that will value it at $24 billion post-investment.
Though Musk is, at the time of writing, still a few hundred million dollars short of that mark. The new capital will be crucial in allowing xAI to compete with existing incumbents.
While xAI has come late to the scene, OpenAI, Anthropic and Google have already released large, powerful generative AI models.
His sales pitch to potential investors is persuasive: xAI could leverage synergies with Musks other companies, such as Tesla and SpaceX for hardware, data and early cash flow.
Although xAI is currently far behind its competitors in collecting training data and running large models, it hopes to catch up on this score by emphasising transparency – and focusing on ‘maximum truth-seeking AI’. This is in contrast with Musk’s current criticism of existing models trained to be ‘woke’.
Competing for Partnerships & Big Tech's Strategic Moves
The fight to become the biggest AI in town has involved some curious sleight-of-hand, including a partnership between the Meta- and xAI-backed startup Character.ai, which specialises in creating conversational threads via large language models.
Meta has been using AI persona bots on Instagram and Facebook. X, Musk’s social networking site, has its own in-house chatbot for premium subscribers, developed by xAI, called Grok.
These conversations underscore how elite tech firms are scrambling to align with the cutting edge of AI startups. Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg has been doubling down on AI investments, hoping to make his company ‘the number-one AI company in the world’.
The race is definitely on. Perhaps you recently tried ChatGPT, the new artificial-intelligence engine used for information retrieval from large text archives by OpenAI, a new San Francisco-based nonprofit (we discuss the implications of ChatGPT and other general-purpose AI models at greater length below).
Or maybe you’ve started getting helpful job-interview coaching from OpenAI’s GPT-4o model, whose response to user queries can be so lifelike that it’s difficult to distinguish from text produced by a human.
Or perhaps you’ve already noticed the new functionality that Google just added to its search engine, enabling users to request the creation of paraphrased and expanded versions of Google’s own search results.
Meanwhile, new forays from others, such as Microsoft’s Co-pilot+PC announcement of enhancing AI cloud capabilities to the network’s edge, encourage all incumbents to press for innovation and market control.
Apple’s AI Ambitions: A Strategic Pivot
Against this background, Apple has now also started to accelerate. At WWDC 2024, talks are that the California company is going to disclose action plans that shift the direction of its business into an era of widespread use of cloud services powered by its super-Macs.
Check out the rumours on Siri updates AI-driven photo editing Proactive intelligence features – but no Apple-branded version of ChatGPT.
But Apple’s work with OpenAI to add its technology to iOS 18 could be the first step towards assuring the solidity of its position in the AI arms race. To take full advantage of the AI breakthroughs out there, Apple is going to need to unleash its own AI.
Powering The Road Ahead in the AI Revolution Era
Nvidia continues to be the major link in the chain: the computational behemoth whose graphics processing units (GPUs) are used to train and run many of the most advanced AI models in the world.
Its chips are thus becoming hard to avoid: the more that the xAIs pour their firepower into the fray, the more Nvidia’s business is going to boom.
What they are all prototyping should be an interesting arena to watch in years to come. Historically, the forces leading AI defined the visions of their times and led to enormous wealth. If their technology becomes a reality, it is potentially the next big tech battleground.
We should hope that Musk’s xAI is as visionary and well-financed as it seems if it is to keep pace with Meta, Apple, Open AI and Nvidia, all of whom are pushing hard.
One thing is certain: mere dominance in this arena will be a race there are few that have prepared for. Countless industries will be altered, and a new way of work and life will end up emerging.
