The AI Race Just Got a SpaceX-Sized Twist
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The AI Daily Brief: Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis
26 min
2 speakers
4 chapters
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
What are the major stories covered in this episode?
Today on the AI Daily Brief, not one but two main episodes crammed into one. The first story is that XAI is being acquired by SpaceX, with the second main being all about OpenAI's new Codex app and the shifting paradigm of how we work with agents. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. All right, friends, quick announcements before we dive in.
First of all, thank you to today's sponsors, Assembly, Robots and Pencils, Blitzy, and Super Intelligent. To get an ad-free version of the show, go to patreon.com slash aiDailyBrief, or you can subscribe directly on Apple Podcasts. To learn about sponsoring the show or pretty much anything else regarding the show, you can go to aiDailyBrief.ai. That's my vibe-coded command center where I keep everything with frequent changes, frankly. Right now, the thing that I would like to point you to, which I have been pointing you to all week, is this January AI Pulse survey. I'm going to leave it open for probably just a couple more days. I basically want to give people better access to actual data around what people are doing in aggregate.
It's things like which AI models are being used most and for what use cases. Give you a little preview right now. Anthropic is cleaning up in the most used model use case. In any case, anyone who fills this out will be thanked with access to the results a week before I share it with anyone else. Mostly, though, you're just contributing to better overall knowledge of what's happening in the world of AI. Now, the last thing that I want to point out today is that we have the rarest of AI Daily Brief episodes, which is the double main. Simply put, there were two stories which were too big to be shoved in the headlines. And I'm pretty convinced that we have some more big stories coming down the pipeline later this week.
So I didn't want to wait on them either. The first is about XAI and SpaceX merging. The second is about the Codex app. And with that said, let's dive in. When I was doing my 2026 predictions, one of the things that we were looking at was the competitive race between the big foundation labs. In a lot of ways, it was kind of easy to see where all the different players were relative to one another coming into this year. Anthropic ahead on coding, and it started to use that to get ahead on enterprise. OpenAI still having the best consumer recognition by far and seeing pretty steady gains in how consumers were switching, for example, from Google Search to ChatGPT Search, but at the same time really losing out on some of the momentum on the enterprise and coding side to Anthropic and on the more general side to Google's Gemini.
Meanwhile, as Google Gemini was coming into the year with the wind in its sails, And then on the other end of the spectrum, there was Meta, who really needed 2025 to be a rebuilding year, but at least they had the Ray-Bans. And the biggest question mark in some ways was XAI and Grok. How are they going to carve out and differentiate their place in this whole race? Now, one of the possibilities that we discussed was that they could start to leapfrog performance because of the investments that they had put into major infrastructure development in the form of the Colossus clusters. So that was one thing we were keeping an eye on. The other thing that we were looking for, though, is whether we were going to see synergistic alignment, let's say, between Elon Musk's various companies.
There were certainly indications that this was a strategy for XAI, given that it had already combined with X slash Twitter. And now the next stage in that Muskian consolidation has come as SpaceX and XAI are officially merging. The deal values the new entity at $1.25 trillion, with SpaceX valued at $1 trillion and XAI at $250 billion. The previous valuation on XAI was rumored to be $230 billion from their $20 billion Series E that closed earlier this month, so this deal is more or less flat from that. SpaceX wrote in its announcement post that it had acquired XAI to, quote, "...form the most ambitious, vertically integrated innovation engine on and off Earth, with AI, rockets, space-based internet, direct-to-mobile-device communications, and the world's foremost real-time information and free speech platform."
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