Nilay Patel

They can accomplish more tasks.

And I don't see any of that from XAI.

It doesn't seem like Elon has a particular thesis of what XAI should be doing or what Grok should be doing besides being like your sexy girlfriend.

Is there any thesis that anybody has identified?

You know, Elon and XAI get a lot of credit for just standing up a frontier AI company and catching up as much as they did.

But very few other companies have been able to do that.

Right.

I always attributed that to, well, what you needed was a lot of compute and Elon has a lot of money.

So he just bought a lot of GPUs and then he stole the internet like everybody else did.

And he trained a model using the technology everyone else trained.

And now he has Croc, which is about as good as GPT-5, which is about as good as Gemini.

And that's the state of the art.

It sounds like you're saying there's actually a lot more differentiation at that frontier model level now.

And just having a whole bunch of GPUs trading away is not enough.

The idea that the models themselves are kind of all interchangeable and you've got to build other kinds of moats, whether it's the personality of the model or specific feature sets or, in the case of Grok,

porn, that to me connects very directly to, well, a bunch of researchers can just leave, right?

If the underlying models are as similar as you're saying, and it's the other moats on top, well, that to me is why you would say, well, I have enough money.

I want to go someplace where the mission matters.

And there's a lot of reasons why the missions at XAI might be different than your perceived mission at OpenAI versus your perceived mission at Anthropic.

If you've been paying attention, you've seen a huge wave of coverage about Anthropic in various publications lately.