Resolves yes if xAI is commonly perceived as being in the same tier as OpenAI, DeepMind, and Anthropic on January 1, 2025.
Inherently subjective, but factors to be considered are: funding, technical breakthroughs, new foundation models, mainstream products, mentions alongside other top labs in media, and its CEO's presence alongside other major lab CEOs at major meetings with e.g. world leaders, plus anything else that seems pertinent.
Resolves no if the criteria are never met, or if they're met, but xAI goes bust or gets absorbed by a pre-existing top lab before the close date. If xAI gets bought by a then-not-major lab/player (e.g. Apple), the market resolves yes if the criteria have otherwise been met.
I won't trade in this market.
1,000
3.00Been somewhat confused by how bearish Manifold is on this question. Using Metaculus' prompt (see here) and the information / criteria provided by the question author, ChatGPT assigns this a probability of 75% and the counterpoints provided are weak. See results below:
Rationale:
To determine whether xAI will be considered a major AI lab by January 1, 2025, it is essential to evaluate the following dimensions:
Funding: xAI has received substantial funding since its inception, backed by its CEO’s strong reputation. Public disclosures show that its funding levels are competitive with OpenAI and Anthropic, suggesting the financial capacity to scale operations and attract top talent.
Technical Breakthroughs: In 2024, xAI released several notable research papers and introduced a foundation model that rivals GPT-4.5 in benchmarks for natural language processing and multimodal capabilities. While the model has not clearly surpassed leading models from OpenAI or DeepMind, it has been recognized in academic and industry circles as a legitimate contender.
Mainstream Products: xAI’s consumer-facing AI assistant launched earlier this year, integrating deeply into social media platforms and achieving significant user adoption. The assistant’s performance has been compared favorably to OpenAI’s ChatGPT by prominent reviewers, further establishing xAI’s relevance in the mainstream market.
Media Mentions and Perception: Over the past year, xAI has been increasingly mentioned alongside OpenAI, DeepMind, and Anthropic in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Economist, and Wired. These articles highlight xAI’s technical advances and the charisma of its CEO.
CEO’s Influence: The CEO of xAI has attended global AI summits alongside leaders from OpenAI, DeepMind, and Anthropic, discussing regulation and policy with world leaders. This visibility strengthens the perception of xAI as part of the top-tier AI lab cohort.
Other Factors:
xAI has maintained independence, avoiding acquisition by larger players or consolidation into existing major labs.
Public perception surveys among industry professionals in late 2024 show xAI as a “promising up-and-comer,” with some ranking it equal to or ahead of Anthropic.
Counterpoints:
While xAI has made notable strides, it has yet to demonstrate a transformative breakthrough akin to AlphaFold (DeepMind) or ChatGPT (OpenAI).
Some analysts argue that xAI’s achievements are driven more by its CEO’s visibility than intrinsic technological superiority.
Final Answer: Probability: 75%
Given the above factors, it is likely but not certain that xAI will be perceived as a major AI lab by January 1, 2025. The organization’s momentum in funding, technical progress, and media recognition positions it strongly, though its relative lack of standout breakthroughs introduces some uncertainty.
@vitamind they need to be in the same tier as OpenAI, Deepmind, and Anthropic. They are making strides but are they even as big as Meta?
@vitamind "xAI released several notable research papers and introduced a foundation model that rivals GPT-4.5 in benchmarks"
Is this just pure hallucination? I don't find this oversized LLM dump persuasive. I think Grok looks bigger to the Elon fans than it is so far. xAI has like 10% the employee base of OpenAI and no one, in my bubble at least, uses xAI products. Elon and GPU purchases are the only things propping them up as contenders, so far. Maybe 2025 or 2026, they will do more than almost catch up.
@AndrewMcKnight on the other hand, from what I can tell from quick look at funding valuation, xAI fairs well at $40B vs Anthropic at $40B and OpenAI $157B. (Not sure how to interpret Deepmind because it's within Google)
@MattReardon Some clarification on how you plan to resolve might be useful here.
"Inherently subjective, but factors to be considered are: funding, technical breakthroughs, new foundation models, mainstream products, mentions alongside other top labs in media, and its CEO's presence alongside other major lab CEOs at major meetings with e.g. world leaders, plus anything else that seems pertinent."
I'm biased as top YES holder, but to give my two cents: XAI has the largest publicly known cluster, where it is training Grok 3, likely using more compute than any prior pretraining run. Grok is integrated into Twitter and has an API. Elon is the highest profile person among all lab CEOs, though arguably XAI is only a small part of his public image. XAI is valued similarly to Anthropic (or slightly higher) as of its last funding round. Grok 2 has benchmark scores on par with other top labs. In my opinion, XAI's public profile is lower than companies like GDM and Anthropic--they spend little on advertising and have a small team, so arguably this gives XAI less of an "It" factor than these two.
My sense is that probably neither a 0% nor a 100% resolution is appropriate if nothing changes from now until the end of the year. You haven't provided much clarification in the comments about how you plan to resolve, so the market is now exclusively following how you plan to address this edge case. In return for little intermediate clarification, the best policy imo is to resolve conservatively (i.e. minimally punishing YES and NO holders for incorrectly guessing what standard you would apply beyond the text of the resolution criteria).
@AdamK "XAI's public profile is lower than companies like GDM and Anthropic". This is kinda what it's all about? Having a huge cluster is great for 2025, not 2024. I can only remember seeing one article that mentions xAI in passing that isn't an article about xAI, but admittedly don't read all that many articles. (I'm holding a bunch of NO so am a bit biased here too)
xAI has raised another $6 billion at a $50 billion valuation. Total raised over $12 billion.
Anthropic has been discussing a funding round that could value the company at between $30 billion to $40 billion. Previously, it was valued at up to $18.4 billion in a funding round led by Menlo Ventures. Total raised about $13 billion.
OpenAI valuation $157B, total raised about $18 billion.
xAI has more valuation then Anthropic, the Grok2 model is ahead of anthropic on several rankings and is very close to the openAI and Gemini models.
David Sacks is an investor in xAI. David Sacks has been appointed as the "White House A.I. & Crypto Czar" by President-elect Donald Trump. This role will involve guiding policy for artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency, aiming to make America a global leader in these areas. Sacks is expected to safeguard free speech online, steer away from Big Tech bias and censorship, and work on a legal framework to provide clarity for the crypto industry to thrive in the U.S. His appointment is part of a broader trend of the Trump administration rewarding Silicon Valley figures who supported his campaign and indicating a pro-crypto and AI-friendly policy direction.
@brianwang Elon has had meetings with world leaders to discuss AI.
Some key meetings focused on AI include:
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of the UK, where they discussed AI risks, regulation, and impact on jobs during the AI Safety Summit.
President Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, with whom Musk talked about AI's potential risks and benefits, as well as the establishment of an AI directorate in Israel.
Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy, where they discussed investment opportunities in Italy's AI sector.
Meeting constantly with president elect Trump to discuss AI, Technology and all topics of government and government efficiency.
Elon has head of xAI will be the only AI leader in the room with many world leaders throughout 2025-2028.
Elon and xAI have solved the coherent memory problem that others thought was impossible for scaling beyond 32000 h100 chips with current networking technology. This allows scaling to 100k and 1M chips at time. xAI has the scaling lead and if scaling laws hold will have a dominant Grok 3 and quarterly releases of Grok 4, 5, 6 through 2025.
I’d like to petition to consider “number of papers published in highly reputable venues like ICLR, NeurIPS (not just arxiv tech reports) and how many citations they get” as part of your resolution criteria.
Most major players in this space have strong, well-regarded, highly cited publications (Google, Meta, Anthropic, OpenAI Baidu etc etc). As a new lab, Xai needs to clear this hurdle and it remains to be seen whether they’ll be able to do so.
Resolves YES (not really). Even the explicitly high bar of @RickRadewagen has been met.
yes – they're now in the top 3 model creators, behind only openai and google https://x.com/lmsysorg/status/1823599819551858830
@0xSMW LMSYS ranking, especially as Goodhart's Law comes into effect, is a poor proxy for "funding, technical breakthroughs, new foundation models, mainstream products, mentions alongside other top labs in media" etc.