Elon Musk's xAI company originally planned to release its flagship AI model Grok3 at the end of 2024, but it has not yet been released. This is not the first time Musk has failed to release a product on time, and his optimistic time expectations have repeatedly failed. The delayed release of Grok3, and other AI companies such as Anthropic facing similar difficulties, reflect the bottleneck of the current development of AI technology, especially the challenges in model expansion and performance improvement. This article will provide an in-depth analysis of the reasons for the delayed release of Grok3 and discuss the difficulties faced by the AI industry in breaking through technical bottlenecks.
Since last summer, billionaire Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company xAI has promised that its flagship model Grok3 would be released in late 2024 as a response to models such as OpenAI GPT-4 and Google Gemini. However, as January 2 comes, Grok 3 still has not appeared, and there is no sign of its imminent launch.
Musk said on the X social platform in July that after training on 100,000 H100 graphics cards, Grok 3 will be launched at the end of the year and will become a "major leap." However, as of today, Grok 3 has not yet been released, and the code on the xAI website shows that the mid-level model "Grok 2.5" may be released first.
This isn't the first time Musk has failed to deliver on a product launch promise. Musk has long been optimistic about launch timing and has often failed to materialize. Despite this, he also mentioned in an interview with podcaster Lex Fridman in August that Grok3 may indeed be released in 2024 with luck.
This delay is not unique to xAI, as AI startup Anthropic faces a similar dilemma. Last year, Anthropic failed to release the successor to its Claude 3 Opus model on time, and recently announced that Claude 3.5 Opus, originally scheduled for release at the end of 2024, was removed from its development documents.
In addition, flagship models from Google and OpenAI have experienced similar delays in recent months, reflecting current bottlenecks in AI technology. As the performance improvements of each generation of models gradually slow down, AI companies are facing difficulties in breaking through bottlenecks using traditional scaling methods.
Musk also mentioned in the interview with Fridman that although they hope that Grok3 can become the most advanced AI model, this may not be possible. "We may not achieve that, and that's our aspiration," he noted.
What’s more noteworthy is that xAI’s team size is leaner than its competitors, which may be another reason for the delay in release.
This series of delays highlights the limitations of AI training methods, especially in terms of traditional calculations and data set expansion. With the advancement of technology, how to break through existing bottlenecks and create more efficient and powerful AI systems has become an urgent problem that the entire industry needs to solve.
The delayed release of Grok3, and the similar difficulties faced by other AI companies, reveal the challenges and opportunities that exist in the development of the AI field. In the future, AI companies need to find new breakthroughs in technological innovation and resource management to better meet the growing needs of users.