Elon Starts another Company - AI this time

[Yazata]

xAI, Anthropic, Google and OpenAI each receive a $200 million exploratory R&D contract from the US Department of Defense's Chief Digital and Artifical Intelligence Office (CDAO).

https://www.ai.mil/Latest/News-Press/PR-...onal-secu/

CDAO says: "Today, the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) announced contract awards to leading U.S. frontier AI companies to accelerate Department of Defense (DoD) adoption of advanced AI capabilities to address critical national security challenges. Frontier AI companies lead development of the most advanced AI models and technologies, conduct insightful research into the use of frontier AI, and pioneer efforts to address both the potential benefits and risks of frontier AI technologies...

DoD is implementing a commercial-first approach to accelerating DoD adoption of AI. Today’s awards bring in the best U.S.-based frontier AI talent to help apply cutting-edge AI to solve DoD use cases...

Finally, DoD is partnering with the General Services Administration (GSA) to bring the best AI technologies to the federal government while leveraging whole-of-government buying power for AI production and compute resources."

To this end, xAI announced Grok for Government.

https://x.ai/news/government

xAI says: "Today, we’re proud to announce Grok For Government – a suite of frontier AI products available to United States Government customers...

This includes frontier AI like Grok 4, our latest and most advanced model so far, which brings strong reasoning capabilities with extensive pretraining models. Our government partnerships will also bring to bear tools like Deep Search, Tool Use, and more integrations – all of which are industry-leading commercial products.

We’ve been engaging closely with innovators and leaders in the government to make sure that our offerings are able to deliver the capabilities we need. In addition to our commercial offerings, we will be making some unique capabilities available to our government customers, including:

Custom models for national security and critical science applications available to specific customers.

Forward Deployed Engineering and Implementation Support, with USG cleared engineers

Custom AI-powered applications to accelerate use cases in healthcare, fundamental science, and national security, to name a few examples

Models soon available in classified and other restricted environments

Partnerships with xAI to build custom versions for specific mission sets..."

[Yazata]

Elon has confirmed that xAI will be starting Grokipedia, arguably a competitor to Wikipedia.

While Elon is critical of Wikipedia, that isn't really the reason for Grokipedia. The Grok supercomputer is already building a giant database of he world's knowledge to further its goal of understanding the universe. As part of that, it has to judge the data items as to their credibility and likelihood of being true. (Probably mostly by coherence I would guess.)

So why not add a search function and some style-rules for writing articles

"We are building Grokipedia @xAI
Will be a massive improvement over Wikipedia.
Frankly, it is a necessary step towards the xAI goal of understanding the Universe."

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1972992095859433671

[Image: G2GAUvAXEAAt0ar?format=jpg&name=900x900]

[Syne]

Love how happy he looks there. And it's about time someone put Wikipedia, and their leftist editors, out of business.

[confused2]

Sooner or later there's going to be an Elon Gate. The headlines! *dread*

[stryder]

Sooner or later there's going to be an Elon Gate. The headlines! *dread*

Ah you know if it became headlines, the press would stretch it out. (Elon-Gated)

[Yazata]

Elon says that a very early Beta Version 0.1 of Grokipedia should be published in about 2 weeks.

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1974698202625679361

[Yazata]

Bloomberg and Reuters are reporting that xAI will be raising an additional $20 billion.

It sounds like a complicated deal, mostly financed by debt with a minority of it equity. The latter includes Nvidia getting a small ownership position in xAI (~2%), paid for in part with GPU chips.

It's worth noting that none of this is confirmed by xAI, Nvidia or anyone else supposedly involved.

[Image: G2slB8hXYAEnthA?format=jpg&name=small]

[Yazata]

I'm hearing that a very-early first beta version of Grokipedia might roll out this weekend.

While we are waiting for that, here's Grok Imagine

Like several other AI's, you can give it text or verbal prompts, telling it what you want it to depict, and what aesthetic styles you want, and it will imagine it for you and then animate it for you in a short video clip.

This one has an Elonian futuristic sci-fi look. I think that it's several short segments spliced together.

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1974811909242429695

And this one captures a rather James Bondish early 1960's vibe really well, how people then expected the future to look, never expecting the neo-puritan reality that we actually got. (There's even a split second image of Trump, which is kind of fitting, since this is the America that he wants to revive.) It's a short clip the loops.

https://x.com/TheHeavyPulp/status/1978435032659157357

What's more, I've heard that x.AI is hiring video game designers. So x.AI video games are coming at some point in the future.

The goal of building a super-AI to try to understand the mysteries of the universe hasn't gone away by any means, but x.AI also needs revenue to pay the bills and be self-supporting. Hence the coming video games (and military contracts, and...)