The list of flagship AI models that missed their promised launch windows continues to grow.
Last summer, billionaire Elon Musk, the founder and CEO of AI company xAI, said that Grok 3, xAI’s next major AI model, would arrive by “end of year” 2024. Grok, xAI’s answer to models like OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Google’s Gemini, can analyze images and respond to questions, and powers a number of features on X, Musk’s social network.
“Grok 3 end of year after training on 100k H100s should be really something special,” Musk wrote in a July post on X, referring to xAI’s enormous Memphis-based cluster of GPUs. “Grok 3 will be a major leap forward,” he said in a mid-December follow-up post.
Yet it’s January 2, and Grok 3 hasn’t arrived — nor are there signs its rollout is imminent.
In fact, some code on xAI’s website spotted by AI tipster Tibor Blaho suggests that an intermediate model, “Grok 2.5,” may land first.
And to be fair, in an interview with podcaster Lex Fridman in August, Musk said that Grok 3 would “hopefully” be available in 2024 “if we’re lucky.”
But Grok 3’s MIA status is interesting because it’s part of a growing trend.
Last year, AI startup Anthropic failed to deliver a successor to its top-of-the-line Claude 3 Opus model. Months after announcing that a next-gen model, Claude 3.5 Opus, would by released by the end of 2024, Anthropic scrapped all mention of the model from its developer documentation. (According to one report, Anthropic did finish training Claude 3.5 Opus sometime last year, but decided that releasing it didn’t make economic sense.)
Reportedly, Google and OpenAI have also suffered setbacks with their flagship models in recent months.
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