There is actually a real bull case for xAI (that I don't endorse), e.g. from people who think that chips & computer is the main determiner of model quality. xAI may plausibly soon have the biggest training apparatus of anyone.
replyI think talent is more important than compute, as I wrote in my Jan 2026 predictions that Anthropic would end up on top this year: https://futuresearch.ai/blog/forecasting-top-ai-lab-2026/
If you don't spend any time comparing models to the point where you don't know about benchmarks, why do you care where people think the line for SOTA is?
replyThe benchmark game is wholly gamed, but the proof is in the pudding. I know people using Anthropic, OpenAI, and Gemini. Chinese models locally. But who uses Grok for anything but porn? Whatever the benchmarks might say, Grok is just trash in practice. They spent too much time teaching it to be edgy and not enough time teaching it to code.
reply> I assume "extremely skeptical" is you being generous
replyI'm not sure that's the case. Every value in this forecast is absurd, I actually think the author is sincere in there feeling that they are being extremely skeptical.