The listing of flagship AI fashions that missed their promised launch home windows continues to develop.
Final summer time, billionaire Elon Musk, the founder and CEO of AI firm xAI, stated that Grok 3, xAI’s subsequent main AI mannequin, would arrive by “finish of yr” 2024. Grok, xAI’s reply to fashions like OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Google’s Gemini, can analyze photos and reply to questions, and powers numerous options on X, Musk’s social community.
“Grok 3 finish of yr after coaching on 100k H100s ought to be actually one thing particular,” Musk wrote in a July put up on X, referring to xAI’s huge Memphis-based cluster of GPUs. “Grok 3 will likely be a serious leap ahead,” he stated in a mid-December follow-up put up.
But it’s January 2, and Grok 3 hasn’t arrived — nor are there indicators its rollout is imminent.
In actual fact, some code on xAI’s web site noticed by AI tipster Tibor Blaho suggests that an intermediate mannequin, “Grok 2.5,” might land first.
Grok[.]com is presumably coming quickly with Grok 2.5 mannequin (grok-2-latest – “Our most clever mannequin”) – thanks for the trace, anon! pic.twitter.com/emsvmZyaf7
— Tibor Blaho (@btibor91) December 20, 2024
Granted, this isn’t the primary time Musk has set a lofty objective and missed it. It’s well-established that Musk’s pronouncements in regards to the timing of product launches are sometimes unrealistic at finest.
And to be truthful, in an interview with podcaster Lex Fridman in August, Musk stated that Grok 3 would “hopefully” be accessible in 2024 “if we’re fortunate.”
However Grok 3’s MIA standing is fascinating as a result of it’s a part of a rising pattern.
Final yr, AI startup Anthropic didn’t ship a successor to its top-of-the-line Claude 3 Opus mannequin. Months after saying {that a} next-gen mannequin, Claude 3.5 Opus, would by launched by the top of 2024, Anthropic scrapped all point out of the mannequin from its developer documentation. (In accordance to at least one report, Anthropic did end coaching Claude 3.5 Opus someday final yr, however determined that releasing it didn’t make financial sense.)
Reportedly, Google and OpenAI have additionally suffered setbacks with their flagship fashions in current months.
This may very well be proof of the restrictions of present AI scaling legal guidelines — the strategies firms are utilizing to extend the capabilities of their fashions. Within the not-too-distant previous, it was doable to attain substantial efficiency boosts by coaching fashions utilizing huge quantities of computing energy and bigger and bigger information units. However the features with every technology of mannequin have begun to shrink, main firms to pursue various strategies.
Grok 3 is coaching with 10X, quickly 20X the compute of Grok 2
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 21, 2024
Musk himself alluded to this within the Fridman interview.
“You’re hoping for [Grok 3] to be state-of-the-art?” Fridman requested.
“Hopefully,” Musk replied. “I imply, that is the objective. We might fail at this objective. That’s the aspiration.”
There may very well be different causes for Grok 3’s delay. xAI has a a lot smaller crew than lots of its rivals, for one. Nonetheless, the slipped launch time-frame provides to the physique of proof that typical AI coaching approaches are operating up in opposition to a wall.