Just last week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had appeared to challenge Elon Musk to compete with him by building good products. It appears that Musk has done just that — and sent a message to the rest of the AI space to boot.
Elon Musk wrote a T-shirt featuring Elden Ring character Malenia during Grok-3’s launch. Grok-3 performed well on most benchmarks, and is likely the strongest AI model available to users currently, ahead of Google and OpenAI. The Malenia character, which featured on Musk’s T-shirt, is known for saying “I have never known defeat” in Elden Ring video game. Musk’s choice of T-shirt seemed to imply that while he’d been slow off the blocks with xAI, he’d managed to build the world’s best current AI model with Grok-3.
Elden Ring is a 2022 action role-playing game whose worldbuilding provided by Game of Thrones writer George R. R. Martin. Set in the Lands Between, players control a customizable player character on a quest to repair the Elden Ring and become the new Elden Lord. The Malenia character is a demigod and one of the shardbearers in the game, known for her golden winged helm, red cape, and intricate armor. She is a formidable boss character, recognized for her challenging battles and tragic backstory tied to the game’s lore. She’s also known for the phrase “I have never known defeat”.
Musk is a known fan of video games, and is one of the best players in the world at Diablo. But while he was also the best in the world at building electric cars, rockets, and brain-interfaces, he’d fallen behind on AI. He’d co-founded OpenAI in 2015, and also provided initial funding. But after falling out with his co-founders — including Sam Altman — over OpenAI’s direction, he’d dissociated himself from the company. OpenAI, meanwhile, went on to raise funding from Microsoft, and released ChatGPT in 2022, which set off the current AI revolution.
After ChatGPT had gone mainstream, Musk had announced his own AI company. Named xAI, it had started off much later than its peers, but Musk had used his legendary sagacity and management skills to quickly get it up to speed — he’d helped xAI build a GPU cluster in 19 days, which NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang had said usually took other companies as long as a year to set up. It had become the largest single cluster anywhere in the world, and Musk has used it to train Grok-3 over the last few months. And with Grok-3 beating all AI models that are currently publicly available, it appears that in AI, as in electric cars, rockets and politics, Elon Musk is in no mood to taste defeat.