Elon Musk’s X.AI The Future of Artificial Intelligence

Craig: so have you seen this, fifty billion dollar valuation? did you ever think did you ever think that the only thing that could overshadow a tesla at a stoplight might be an ai revolution? elon musk's latest venture, xai, has catapulted with a jaw dropping valuation of over fifty billion in the latest funding round. it's like watching a rocket while simultaneously scrolling through tiktok. exhilarating and slightly bewildering. so what do you think about this x ai valuation?

Jon: yeah. so it's hard for me to say so just fyi, this article this is an older article from november twentieth. so we're covering it now just for those that don't know. isn't, like, this isn't new news as far as what we typically cover. but just so that people know, like, this is yeah. this was from november twentieth. but,

Craig: yeah, this article came out less than a month ago, and we're calling it old news.

Jon: just be clear enough. we are because things are moving

Craig: soon enough. i know. i just wanted to laugh at it. that's all

Jon: i'm doing. it's hilarious. yeah. it's hilarious that something came out a month ago is old news because who knows? they could have raised another round by now. right? you don't know. but they haven't. but this is from november twentieth. so you asked me what do i think. so i haven't messed around with grok yet. so i don't know, like, whether or not it's any good. have you messed around with it at all? have you played around with it yet, craig?

Craig: i'm just starting to. i love, grok's image creation. okay. and they don't give a crap about copyright, which is awesome. you know, it's what users want. for example, this picture of elon musk here, was created by grok on wow.

Jon: that's really good, man.

Craig: yeah. and i had a bunch of other ones. i was having fun with it. i've reached my free limit. grok is, free now, so everyone can go in and take a look at it. you don't need a premium thing. fifty billion. interesting. you know, we know that openai is worth over a hundred and hundred billion now. yeah. maybe even a hundred and fifty billion at this point is grok as big. i don't know. but you see what is going on with colossus. right? and it's the biggest ai data center in the world. and elon keeps saying and he's, ex excellent, face person who talks to investors and whatever. he claims he's gonna win the ai revolution. so i could see why people are, excited about this. and, you know, elon has proven that he can win in these, challenging and competitive fields.

Jon: yeah. so here's the thing that worries me. and i don't know. but not worries me, but interesting. so, just fyi, some of the funding round, like, are the big wigs. like, we're talking sequoia capital, valor equity, anderson horowitz, and qatar investment. right? but so with their valuation, they're now higher valued than anthropic and perplexity, which are two that i use on a daily basis, which i feel and, again, i haven't used grok, so, i feel they're much better. but, again, how much of this is the question to you, craig. how much of this is in the value of the actual xai technology, and how much of it is in elon musk's attachment to this?

Craig: and i'll add a third. k. how much is it to, is it the user base he already has in x? oh. that? so you flip this on, you know, we say, oh, we're not using this. well, we are just not the way you think because it's, it's behind x, and now everybody who's using x can use this, and for free before premium. so now you've got hundreds of millions of users overnight, and it can change the game pretty quickly when that happens. yeah. so when this is free, you're saying, well, wait a minute. why am i and, obviously, there's paid tiers and whatnot. so it is a game changer. i have not tried the functionality, specifically. i've just signed up for the apis so i can start, throwing queries at it and see what it comes up with from a writing perspective, from a creativity perspective, as i use ai, you know, i use chatgpt a lot. constantly, i have two or three chatgpt windows open. i'm currently working, you know, it's as a virtual assistant, as i chat with it all the time to help me create things, do things, think about things. we'll have to see where xai fits into all of that. but, you know, the billion dollar valuation doesn't come from thin air. it reflects a growing confidence in ai technology done right. you know? and we're putting this behind xai's potential is buttressed by investor investors, like you mentioned, who believe it could innovate breakthroughs across numerous sectors, health care, automotive, finance, just to name a few. i saw this morning, that elon is, talking about x mail. he's gone after gmail, now. so, like, you start putting all of that together, and you got a quick competition here. i think we're he's building an ecosystem around twitter, which he's planned for a while. and if ai xai is bolted naturally to it, that might give him a long term advantage versus, say, somebody like google who is bolting ai on top of existing products

Jon: yeah.

Craig: rather than building it from the ground up. same thing with microsoft. i think we're gonna end up with microsoft, google, facebook openai, and x. i think the rest of them, major players will disappear quickly.

Jon: yeah. so just quickly have you, have you heard what people are saying about google's ai, endeavors? people are saying they're the comeback story of the year.

Craig: well, yeah. if you're paying attention with gemini two point o, which we talked briefly about last week, but i've done a little bit more digging into because they just announced it that day or the day before. i hadn't looked at it. it is superior at a fraction of the cost, and a lot of people are loving it. especially, you know, if you're paying your twenty bucks a month, you don't care. you know, the cost comes in when you're calling the apis. right? like, if you're doing automation, it's only a, you know, a fraction of a cent per call or whatever depending on compute power. but once you start automating things, that starts to add up and add up, and you're saying, okay. this can respond it better than openai, better than some of these other or just as good at one tenth the cost. so now you can do way more, and you're talking about one tenth the cost. you've used coding tools to build apps before. yeah. and that takes a lot of tokens.

Jon: for sure.

Craig: just it is. it's clearing different things to create the code you wanna do, and i'm just trying to lay a situation out there so people understand why there'd be so many ai api calls, why you would use all these things. so it's really curious to see where they're gonna stand and where does x i i i gonna fit into that cost model. so google gemini, we, just our podcast on that where google told people to please die has gone out there. it's moving along. all these things are moving along, and i'm really happy that they're competing at performance and cost, faster, better, cheaper, because that only means, more for us, the consumer. yeah. who was it that said, the feature is here now. it's just not evenly distributed. oh, that's william gibson. sorry. i was like, who said that? yeah.

Jon: i can't remember. yeah.

Craig: it was william gibson. yeah. the author. and it's true because only so many people can afford to pay for, you know, catch etp pro at two hundred bucks a month or, to build these, automated ai solutions that go back and forth. and as it goes down cheaper where you're talking about, twenty bucks a month versus hundreds of dollars a month, all of a sudden, it becomes your democratizing compute power and ai automation, and that is exciting.

Jon: yeah. for sure. yep.

Craig: but with great power, like i said before, comes great responsibility. ethical considerations surrounding ai are no laughing matter. and musk, known for its outspoken views, emphasizes transparency, accountability, aiming to steer xi clear of these topien scenarios we see in science fiction. he's trying to save the day in the realm of ai, whatever that means. right? because yeah. i think he's the one we fear. not yeah. yeah. say what you will about elon musk, but did you watch that werobot event and those hundreds of robots coming out that are gonna be powered by xai, all those teslas that are gonna be powered by xai, and you sit back and say, he might just win the race. like, you know, they're gonna be doing things that are crazy, because of all the things they're doing. yeah. and, you know, when does skynet take

Jon: hold? exactly. that's the question. we're getting close, especially there were these, we didn't cover it. i don't know if i posted the article. there's these new robots you can start buying next year that, that have basic tasks that they can do, that you can start buying. so we're getting there, and it's scary.

Craig: so as we look to the rise and at the future of ai with x xai, one question emerges. how do we ensure that these intelligent systems not only innovate, but do so with humanity in mind? will we wind up sharing our world with benevolent ai, or will we have to schedule a summit with them to keep the peace? join the conversation. what are your thoughts on ethical dimensions of ai, and do you think xai is set to become the next leader in this tech revolution? love to hear your predictions.