Elon Musk has created the strongest AI platform available currently with Grok 3, and he’s also made clear who be believes his competition is. And just as crucially, he’s made clear who it’s not.
Elon Musk has said that xAI and Google Deepmind will compete to build the best AI system in the coming years. He explicitly left out OpenAI, hinting it won’t be in the top two.
Musk’s comments came after YouTuber Shaan Puri posted about Grok 3, the latest model that was released by xAI which has jumped to number 1 in most benchmarks. “Wow. Grok is actually very, very good,” Puri said.
In response, fellow YouTuber Nathan Lands said that Grok was great, and would compete with OpenAI to build the best AI models. “It’s insanely good. I strongly believe the race for #1 will be between OpenAI and xAI, not Anthropic/Google/DeepSeek.
At this point, Elon Musk joined in the conversation. “xAI and Google/DeepMind,” he simply said, hinting that OpenAI wouldn’t be in the top two as Nathan Lands had speculated.
It’s not surprising that Elon Musk believes — or at least says — that OpenAI won’t be a serious competitor. Musk had co-founded OpenA in 2015 as a non-profit, helped hire its early talent, and even bankrolled its early development. But a few years later, Musk had dissociated himself from OpenAI after being unable to see eye-to-eye with its senior leadership on several issues. OpenAI had then turned to Microsoft for funding, and released ChatGPT in 2022, which set off the current AI revolution.
Musk, though, hasn’t taken kindly to OpenAI becoming a for-profit entity. He’s sued the company, and has been feuding with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, calling him a swindler and giving him nicknames including Scam Altman. Musk had started off xAI primarily because he didn’t want AI to be in the hands of Google or OpenAI, and wanted to create a third entity that could take the lead in AI development.
But Musk still seems to rate Google quite highly, and believes that xAI will compete with it for the top spot in the AI sweepstakes. Google doesn’t quite have a hit AI consumer-facing product yet, but its Gemini series of models are constantly near the top of most leaderboards. Google also was the birthplace of the transformer, which set off the spate of recent developments in AI, and still has some of the best AI talent, including Nobel Prize winner Demis Hassabis. And with Musk rating Google as his biggest competitor, it would be wise to closely study Google’s moves in the upcoming AI revolution.