I genuinely don’t understand why you didn’t propose that anyone took over the [EXPLETIVES DELETED] from xAI, since I believe that it is xAI and China who motivate the Big Three to race hard and are far harder to make deals with. OpenAI, Anthropic and GDM, unlike xAI, agreed to condemn the efforts of Chinese distillators! What would have happened with the race ifthe world had only the American Big Three, not xAI, Meta AI research or China?
IMO xAI is no longer a frontier lab. All 11 of Musk’s cofounders have left, along with much of the technical talent, and they haven’t produced a frontier model in some time. If someone took over xAI, it might speed up the race, since you’d be giving over their vast compute to a more competent actor. That being said, I agree that they have historically been a worse actor for AI Safety than the big three labs.
I don’t think that xAI is THAT far from being a frontier lab. Ryan Shea estimates it to be three moths behind, not seven months behind as Zvi was informed by Wildeford. Additionally, Grok 4.20 was released in March. Had xAI been seven months behind, it would be equivalent to a model as capable as the leaders had in August 2025 with xAI having been a leader in early July. And yet we see Grok 4.20 close to the frontiers[1] of ARC-AGI-2 and ARC-AGI-1. I wish that someone actually checked every model on as many benchmarks as they can so that we would quickly learn the capabilities of neglected labs like xAI.
P.S. There are also Grok 5 and Claude Mythos, but they have yet to be released and benchmarked (by what benchmarks?) I am not even sure that Claude Mythos will emerge three months earlier than Grok 5.
For comparison, the performance of Grok 4 on the benchmark was replicated no later than by GPT-5.1 released on November 12 (or was it GPT-5-pro and Claude Sonnet 4.5 released in August and late September?) meaning that even gaming the benchmark was unlikely to cause xAI to obtain more than 4 months of a false lead.
To answer the question as posed: it’s very clear to me that xAI and Meta AI are bad for my species, I don’t need a hypothetical for that. And I can’t do a clean hypothetical where China doesn’t exist.
I genuinely don’t understand why you didn’t propose that anyone took over the [EXPLETIVES DELETED] from xAI, since I believe that it is xAI and China who motivate the Big Three to race hard and are far harder to make deals with. OpenAI, Anthropic and GDM, unlike xAI, agreed to condemn the efforts of Chinese distillators! What would have happened with the race if the world had only the American Big Three, not xAI, Meta AI research or China?
IMO xAI is no longer a frontier lab. All 11 of Musk’s cofounders have left, along with much of the technical talent, and they haven’t produced a frontier model in some time. If someone took over xAI, it might speed up the race, since you’d be giving over their vast compute to a more competent actor. That being said, I agree that they have historically been a worse actor for AI Safety than the big three labs.
I don’t think that xAI is THAT far from being a frontier lab. Ryan Shea estimates it to be three moths behind, not seven months behind as Zvi was informed by Wildeford. Additionally, Grok 4.20 was released in March. Had xAI been seven months behind, it would be equivalent to a model as capable as the leaders had in August 2025 with xAI having been a leader in early July. And yet we see Grok 4.20 close to the frontiers[1] of ARC-AGI-2 and ARC-AGI-1. I wish that someone actually checked every model on as many benchmarks as they can so that we would quickly learn the capabilities of neglected labs like xAI.
P.S. There are also Grok 5 and Claude Mythos, but they have yet to be released and benchmarked (by what benchmarks?) I am not even sure that Claude Mythos will emerge three months earlier than Grok 5.
For comparison, the performance of Grok 4 on the benchmark was replicated no later than by GPT-5.1 released on November 12 (or was it GPT-5-pro and Claude Sonnet 4.5 released in August and late September?) meaning that even gaming the benchmark was unlikely to cause xAI to obtain more than 4 months of a false lead.
To answer the question as posed: it’s very clear to me that xAI and Meta AI are bad for my species, I don’t need a hypothetical for that. And I can’t do a clean hypothetical where China doesn’t exist.
I agree these are good things to think about.