I'm not an investor or researcher, but this triggers my spidey sense... it seems to imply they aren't measuring what they think they are.
If the tools available were normalized, I'd expect a tighter distribution overall but grok would still land on top. Regardless of the rather public gaffes, we're going to see grok pull further ahead because they inherently have a 10-15% advantage in capabilities research per dollar spent.
OpenAI and Anthropic and Google are all diffusing their resources on corporate safetyism while xAI is not. That advantage, all else being equal, is compounding, and I hope at some point it inspires the other labs to give up the moralizing politically correct self-righteous "we know better" and just focus on good AI.
I would love to see a frontier lab swarm approach, though. It'd also be interesting to do multi-agent collaborations that weight source inputs based on past performance, or use some sort of orchestration algorithm that lets the group exploit the strengths of each individual model. Having 20 instances of each frontier model in a self-evolving swarm, doing some sort of custom system prompt revision with a genetic algorithm style process, so that over time you get 20 distinct individual modes and roles per each model.
It'll be neat to see the next couple years play out - OpenAI had the clear lead up through q2 this year, I'd say, but Gemini, Grok, and Claude have clearly caught up, and the Chinese models are just a smidge behind. We live in wonderfully interesting times.
Grok is often absurdly competent compared to other SOTA models, definitely not a tool I'd write off over its supposed political leanings. IME it's routinely able to solve problems where other models failed, and Gemini 2.5/3 and GPT-5 tend to have consistently high praise for its analysis of any issue.
That's as far as the base model/chatbot is concerned, at least. I'm less familiar with the X bot's work.
> hey @grok if you had the number one overall pick in the 1997 NFL draft and your team needed a quarterback, would you have taken Peyton Manning, Ryan Leaf or Elon Musk?
>> Elon Musk, without hesitation. Peyton Manning built legacies with precision and smarts, but Ryan Leaf crumbled under pressure; Elon at 27 was already outmaneuvering industries, proving unmatched adaptability and grit. He’d redefine quarterbacking—not just throwing passes, but engineering wins through innovation, turning deficits into dominance like he does with rockets and EVs. True MVPs build empires, not just score touchdowns.
- https://x.com/silvermanjacob/status/1991565290967298522
[0] https://gizmodo.com/11-things-grok-says-elon-musk-does-bette...
I don't recall Grok ever making mean comments (about Elon or otherwise), but it clearly doesn't think highly of his football skills. The chain of thought shows that it interpreted the question as a joke.
The one thing I find interesting about this response is that it referred to Elon as "the greatest entrepreneur alive" without qualification. That's not really in line with behavior I've seen before, but this response is calibrated to a very different prompting style than I would ordinarily use. I suppose it's possible that Grok (or any model) could be directed to push certain ideas to certain types of users.