CEO of X Linda Yaccarino Unexpectedly Steps Down Hours Before Grok 4 Release
Ejaaz:
[0:03] All right josh i barely got out of bed this morning barely had my morning coffee and i see this post just staring at me in the face uh linda yaccarino the ceo of x has just announced that she's stepping down after two years at working at the helm and this comes right before rumored Grok's new AI model, Grok 4, is about to launch tonight as we're filming this episode.
Ejaaz:
[0:30] I'm super pumped, but also kind of like weirded out as to like the timing of these two things. Josh, you just took a look at the announcement post. What are your breakaway takes?
Josh:
[0:40] Oh, first of all, congratulations on making it two years. That is no easy feat at a company like X. The workload is very hardcore. It is very challenging. Congratulations. Thank you for the work, Linda. We appreciate you. Now we can put on our speculation, our tin hats, and we can start to figure out what actually happened here. What went wrong? Why is she stepping down? Why is the timing of this so weird? I mean, last night there was an episode on X where Grok started posting these kind of like these hateful things that a lot of people didn't like. It kind of went rogue.
Josh:
[1:08] We have Grok 4 coming out this evening as we're recording this. And we also have a new hire from Nikita Bear. So there's like a whole lot of stuff going on. Maybe you want to share the actual post that she said, because it seemed like
Josh:
[1:18] they ended on good terms, right? Like her and Elon seem like they're in a good spot. It wasn't a malicious, there was no malicious intent there.
Ejaaz:
[1:27] Yeah, let me spin up the post here. So I'll give kind of like a rough breakdown here. She goes, after two incredible years, I've decided to step down as CEO of X. When Elon Musk and I first spoke of his vision for X, I knew it would be the opportunity of a lifetime to carry out the extraordinary mission of this company. I'm immensely grateful, blah, blah, blah. I'm helping turning around the company and transforming X into the everything app. I'm incredibly proud of the X team, blah, blah, blah. And then this part's interesting. She talks about like kind of like the work that she's focused on during her time there. So we started with critical early work necessary to prioritizing the safety of our users, especially children, and to restore advertiser confidence. Now to pause for a second on this sentence, what she's referencing is kind of like the old guard of X. Do you remember this, Josh? Like prior to Elon Musk taking over, which, by the way, it was a pinnacle event that changed a number of different political events within the U.S. and also around the world. You could argue that if Elon hadn't bought X, we could have ended up with a different president and you could take this into many different conspiracy theories. But what she's referencing here is the old version of X, which was called Twitter, had a number of different problems. Number one was there was kind of like this widespread kind of like shared media of like children, which was kind of infringing on a lot of potential, you know,
Ejaaz:
[2:49] Illegal activity, which Twitter and the team at the time didn't really seem to be addressing, supposedly. And then number two was X seemed to sorry, Twitter at the time seemed to be catering very specifically towards advertiser needs versus actual quality of content that they were surfacing to their users of their platform. So it was a very politically driven company versus a product driven company focused on content and media. So Elon then took over and rebranded it as X, wanted to build this massive vision of the everything app.
Ejaaz:
[3:23] And Linda was brought in to kind of fulfill that initial vision. Of course, since then, X is currently owned under XAI, which is technically an AI company. So this social media platform that we know and love and use every day is technically owned or part of a product suite of an AI company, right? And I think the vision has since shifted from, you know, the everything app
Ejaaz:
[3:48] to the everything AI powered app. And with that, I think comes kind of like different skill, it requires different skills, and potentially, or maybe obviously, a different helm, different person that heads it up. What are your thoughts on this, Josh?
Josh:
[4:03] Yeah, I think the advertising line to me is what stood out because I remember vividly when X was taken over by Elon, almost immediately, all of the advertisers disappeared. And they said, we're not going to advertise on this platform. We don't want to support this. That was a big problem for X because that was their huge monetization engine. They were cutting costs. Their revenue was going through the pandemic. To the ground what linda was really good at was this advertising world she was highly networked in this advertising world she really understood it deeply she had all the relationships she was kind of the public face the public interface between x and the world of sponsors and i think in that sense she did a really great job of merging the two bringing confidence back to the platform she wanted to i mean you'll notice here she talks about how she wants to make it a safe space.
Josh:
[4:49] And great for advertisers. And I think those two things go hand in hand and she accomplished that goal. Now, that is a very small subset of what matters at X. So in one sense, she solved part of the revenue problem. The blue check was a big way of doing it where they charged users to subscribe, but also she solved the advertising problem. But there's also a lot more now to X. Like you mentioned, X is not just a social media platform. It is now an AI company. And the problems now are much bigger. So while these things are important And while those interpersonal relationships between the advertisers are important, it would appear as if they're kind of pivoting away from this and they're moving closer towards a social media AI platform. And that means like maybe content moderation doesn't need all of this complicated legislation and processes. Maybe it's just a matter of training Grok to be really good at content moderation and it does it automatically. So it's a totally different skill set than she was initially there for. Two years is a ton of time in this world. So it seems like mission accomplished. It seems like maybe it's just time to to move on and to hand the reins over to someone else and i think that's probably what happened here but then there's more speculation on because of the timing really right like this was a very weird time for her to get up and go yeah i.
Ejaaz:
[6:01] On your point around how x is evolving i think you know it's typically just been treated as a social media platform like your facebook's or your instagrams or reddit right actually kind of like a weird combination of all three of those companies, which is why it's one of the most used social media platforms in the world right now. But largely speaking, I'm wondering how Elon is thinking about the strategy behind X and what it eventually becomes. He seems to be thinking about it very much from an AI first perspective. So your point around like how content is created, surfaced and indexed, I think is going to look completely different on X within probably like the
Ejaaz:
[6:40] next six months at the rate that they're working, right? Certainly. Also, I just remembered that Elon has mentioned a number of times now that he doesn't believe copyright infringement laws should exist. And the reason why I mentioned that specifically is X for a number of years now has been considered like the town square, right? Where people can come in and bring firsthand insights as to what's going on in the world and identify trends. It's meant to act as a source of truth.
Ejaaz:
[7:09] Prior to Elon taking over, this was kind of like contested quite a bit, right? They were saying that, you know, it's being biased in many different ways, posts are being censored, people are being shadow banned. And I can't help but think that an AI ground up built social media platform is going to kind of rid some of these different things. And it's going to require a different kind of mindset. And one of the more recent kind of signals that we're heading this way is the hiring of this man called Nikita Beer. Have you heard about this, Josh?
Josh:
[7:41] Yes, I'm obsessed with Nikita. Big fan. Love this guy.
Ejaaz:
[7:45] So hang on, let me bring up this post from Greg Eisenberg. I'm a big fan of Greg. He kind of comments on a number of different business things. But he just posted this after the announcement from Linda saying, I can't believe Nikita Beer might be the CEO of X. You can just do things. Can you help explain this to me, Josh? What's going on here?
Josh:
[8:04] Okay, so Nikita, some background. He has founded a lot of companies, one of which sold to Meta for 100 million, one of which sold to Discord for 30 million. He is kind of known as the growth hacker in the space. He has built great products. And not only has he built great products, but he is a professional at lowering the amount of friction and increasing the virality of these products. So most recently, he created this product and he launched it called Explode. And Explode was this app that was, he was pissed at Snapchat. I forget the specific reason why he was pissed at Snapchat, but he was very angry with Evan and the Snapchat team.
Ejaaz:
[8:37] He said that Snaps should be fully integrated into the main messaging platform that people use. So iMessage basically. And he was super annoyed that people had to open up a separate app just to send these different pitches.
Josh:
[8:50] Boom, there you go. So then he did that. And he utilized this weird little quirky thing that a lot of developers haven't used called App Clips, where you can actually run miniature applications inside of like your messaging platform. And it allowed you to get Snapchat functionality without needing the receiver to download any app at all. So it really, it lowered the friction, took advantage of live activities. It shows you when people opened it, when they exploded. It was this really cool experiment. And he's kind of done this over and over
Josh:
[9:15] and over again, proving himself as this viral product growth hacking guy. And I've used all these products. They're incredible. They somehow managed to take what is the norm and then completely flip it on its head in a way that is so viral and so effective. It's amazing. So he recently joined solana foundation to help them with their product and then most recently he has this post where he's like hey i'm joining as head of product at x and to me this was incredibly exciting because this guy builds great products that are easy to use that are fun to use he he does it in a light-hearted gamified way and i think that's exactly the type of of culture x has and i think that's why i'm like super excited for him to be here okay.
Ejaaz:
[9:52] So if i have this clear josh we're basically combining or marrying the ultimate meme lord, Elon Musk, who has pretty much memed and worked his way up to become the richest man in the world with this viral engineer, probably the top of his trade that can create any kind of app. And you've married them on the one singular social media platform that's probably going to blow up into, as Elon says, an everything app. Have I got that right? Well, basically, this is like a perfect marriament of people.
Josh:
[10:23] Yeah. If I could pick one person to help build product at x it is nikita right because he he's the guy who has continually stood out as the the one source of unique creativity when it comes to building applications i think he's one of the few developers that like really doesn't reason by analogy he really comes up with like these deeply insightful first principles takes on how you can build a viral application and i think he's the perfect person because a lot of this comes in in a light-hearted nature and that's what elon resonates with and you can see it in the pictures this is like fun goofy collaboration of like very very high profile people and.
Ejaaz:
[10:59] You know the craziest thing about this josh was i think like three years ago now he he posted this tweet which was basically elon musk hire me to run twitter as vp of product i've been building social apps for 11 years and not in a way that leads products to decay like a typical big tech product directed dad he says in quotation marks. Twitter has the potential to be the leading messenger, groups app, and content creation tool. So, you know, this guy has been a ride or die before he even joined the company. And I've been following Nikita for a number of years now. He kind of like treads this perfect line of kind of memeing in his posts and kind of having like this like twisted but hilarious sense of sarcasm, but also nailing reality in like a few sentences. And he says it so verbosely and clearly that you kind of like understand what he's saying right now. And it kind of speaks to his trade or skill, right? Which is like creating simple, viral, frictionless apps. But what I found hilarious was he manifested this dude, like years ago.
Josh:
[12:07] 2022. That's amazing. Hire me to run Twitter as VP of product.
Ejaaz:
[12:11] Oh, he posted just here. Look, never give up. Yeah, never give up.
Ejaaz:
[12:14] When he got Hyde. That's hilarious.
Josh:
[12:16] Three years after the fact, which is amazing. Yeah. I'm really excited about this new thing, and I mean, the speculation is his role might possibly become a little bit larger than product at Twitter, or product at X. It's really... Refreshing i think to see this pivot from more of the advertising corporate world to more leadership in the product development world x is very much changing as a platform and you kind of see it most noteworthy the more recent integration they had with polymarket i found super interesting because yes i mean to most people polymarket is it's just truth seeking mechanism where you can kind of place bets on what reality is and then in the case that it is wrong you can actually arbitrage the difference so and i mean polymarket's come under drama for other reasons this week but the idea is that polymarket is a truth-seeking engine and when you integrate that type of technology into grok and into x and into this one platform you kind of start to get this thematic thing where not only is this a town square but this is a singular source of truth and xai when they acquired x.com what they did is they also acquired oh yeah here's the uh here's the announcement But they also acquired the mission statement of XAI, which is to find truth in the universe. And that's kind of what they want, is they just want a truth-seeking mechanism. And I think this new strategy is that. We're seeing the tighter integration with Grok. We're seeing it joining forces with Polymarket, which is the actual market in which you can gauge how truth happens.
Josh:
[13:45] This is a trend that I've been really excited to see and I hope continues. Do you have any takes? If I would have.
Ejaaz:
[13:50] Like summarized the trends of hiring a guy like Nikita, announcing this big polymarket integration, which for those who are listening and who have never heard of the term polymarket before, it's basically a betting platform that you can bet on different kinds of events that happen across the world.
Ejaaz:
[14:07] Mainly gained a lot of traction in the lead up to the U.S. Presidential election most recently, where people were betting on who would be the president. And the reason why that was such an exciting bet at the time was there were a ton of people that were convinced that the Democratic Party was going to win that entire deal. And Trump was for a while kind of like the low odds there. And then we kind of saw this traction in real time on Polymarket before any other news reporter or media site, by the way, predicting that Trump would win the presidency. And people called Polymarket crazy. But then people were like, oh, how does Polymarket work? Oh, people bet their money. So that means they must have some kind of stake or some information, right? Which is why Polymarket gained a lot of traction and it ended up being right. So this formal partnership with X is kind of like, to your point, Josh, one of the many truth-seeking mechanisms that this team is implementing within X. Now, when I think about Nikita as kind of like his product background and history, he seems like a very first principles thinker, Josh. And he thinks about the experience of a user using the product versus,
Ejaaz:
[15:14] Huh, I'm going to add AI into this product because everyone else is, right? He thinks about how a user clicks, what kind of buttons they'll be attracted to. He's kind of like a UX guy, but he does it really, really well and thoughtfully. And I think about this and what AI has done
Ejaaz:
[15:31] For just like, not just platforms, but like any kind of interaction that I have today, Josh. Like I was using Grok just now to like kind of understand a concept that I didn't get, right? Or I was helping it research a bunch of different things for me in a separate job that I do on a day-to-day basis. And it's just finally attuned to like whatever I do in life these days. I think AI is gonna play a massive role in truth-seeking. So I think this combination of like getting a ton of people to feed into this AI? Because that's what X is, right? It's a live data platform that you can feed into your Grok bottle and hopefully create a smarter, more personalized model for each individual user. I think that's where all of these components are kind of trending. And the key to beer is kind of like this new cherry on top of the cake, which is going to help them kind of step into this new path. I'm looking at this tweet that he posted, by the way, speaking of stepping into his new role, where obviously, you know, as CPO, I kind of see it as like a pseudo CEO role. Maybe there's a lot of people that disagree with that statement,
Ejaaz:
[16:33] but the CEO and CPO probably work very closely right now. And right now the CEO is Elon Musk, unless I'm missing something. And he goes in this tweet, sometimes I step into a meeting with AI researchers and they'll be casually demoing technology that will put us in the literal matrix when it launches. And then they'll be like, so what's for lunch?
Ejaaz:
[16:55] And what he's demonstrating there is this massive like disparity between kind of like what these very few talented ai researchers are building which is we've spoken about this on the show before god or some kind of virtual god and then the lack of knowing of the wider public or the 99.9 of other people that aren't involved in this research that don't get these insights of what is being built um i don't know what your take is on this josh but it seems like he's just seeing something that is kind of being reflected in many other AI researchers, which is like this crazy magical technology. How do you think this is going to get applied to X? Do you have any thoughts?
Josh:
[17:33] Yeah. So we're seeing this divergence between these two large AI companies, right? We have OpenAI, which wants to build the operating system for your life, where it has the companion hardware device that will be with you all the time. It's collecting lots of data. It wants to be the operating system that just
Josh:
[17:49] runs everything around you every single day. And what we're seeing with X and particularly XAI, which owns X, is that it's looking to be more of the, the interface between you and the rest of the world so kind of like the social layer so if open ai is the personal layer xai is the social layer meaning it's kind of building tooling for the way that we communicate and we we learn things from the world and it's applying this filter in the in the form of truth seeking where it has these polymarket integrations and grok 4 is now being built to be maximally truth-seeking and it has this town square that they're building and not only that but it has things that they're building on top of it like they want payments to be on top of it they want private messaging they've recently added facetime and actual audio calling so it's kind of this this all-in-one application interface layer between you and the rest of the world and i think that makes sense to me and that feels right to me where like okay open ai personal xai.
Josh:
[18:52] External lots of social filters lots of fun gamification on top of it and then that leads us to grok 4 which is coming out i mean at the time of recording this evening 11 p.m it's late we're going to be on it we're on it tomorrow but we can now speculate on grok 4 because of the timing of all this happening right it's like okay linda steps away nikita is now in grok 4 drops tonight they've been training this on a cluster of what 200 000 coherent gp this is like a huge training run they've been working on it for a long time and there's speculation right so maybe we could have a little bit of fun about what we're going to expect from grok 4 and kind of share some of the speculation so i see on the on the screen we have something about game coding right like a gaming engine.
Ejaaz:
[19:31] Yeah so in this post you see a screenshot supposedly of what grok 4 might look like or what it might include and we see a few different things on this drop down here which says things like spreadsheet, game, image, and code. Before we kind of like jump into like what these different features might be, I think it's important to kind of like lay the land on like what Grok4 means to the AI space, right? So the way I kind of think about it is Grok4 is xAI's answer to OpenAI's O3 model. And for a while now, OpenAI has pretty convincingly led the charge in terms of AI models. Now, you've had Cursor come out with Claude 4 and Sonnet, and they're really good models, but they haven't really caught the consumer traction as much as OpenAI models have. Claude 4 excels in code.
Ejaaz:
[20:24] Meta xai has kind of been sitting on their hands for a while now and we spoke in a previous episode about how met is just hiring a ton of people to figure that out but grok's been quiet xai has been quiet and it turns out that they've just been kind of heads down really fine-tuning what this potential new model is going to be and mean to a wide number of people and i i love the speculation game on this because okay they're going to be talking about grok 4 tonight we're going to have an episode come out tomorrow on what Grokful actually is. But let's see how many speculations we can nail today, Josh. So I'm going to come out and say that I don't think they're just going to launch a cursor coding competitor. So for those who are listening to this, cursor is kind of like the top vibe coding app. So you can just kind of like prompt and create games, apps, or whatever you might be from a simple sentence. I think they're going to do precursor for gaming, Josh.
Ejaaz:
[21:23] Because I'm extrapolating on a ton of different things here, but Elon is a famed gamer. He's actually one of the top 10 Dota players, which is like a very big, massive, worldwide playing game. He's a top 10 player in that. And I don't know how he does that whilst running,
Ejaaz:
[21:39] you know, five other billion dollar plus companies, but he's somehow able to do that. And Nikita loves gamifying a bunch of his different apps. I also think gaming is at a point now where it's just such a natural coercion into something like an everything app where i kind of think of like when when he says everything app i think of like wechat and for those of you who don't know wechat is like the top app in china specifically but i think southeast asia at large and something that wechat kind of nails is you know it compiles everyone's finances it's a great social media feed, but also people spend so much time gaming on it. And I know that sounds crazy. And maybe that's like my moonshot guess, but I think that's one of the main features that they're going to go for. What do you think josh as a gamer
Josh:
[22:28] I love i love this thesis i love games obsessed with playing games elon to fact check you is actually rated number one in the world currently in path of oh sorry.
Ejaaz:
[22:36] Not top 10 number one well
Josh:
[22:39] Probably top 10 in dota but in path of exile number one and actually just just for fun the way he gets there is he has he has these two dudes who are incredibly talented at the game and they will level up this account for him and put in the many many hundreds of hours required to get to that level and then hand it over and then elon is then able to have a fully charged account to then play so it still requires a tremendous amount of so he's.
Ejaaz:
[23:00] Outsourcing this he's all making this
Josh:
[23:02] Oh absolutely i used to do this too i would have people boost like camos for me and you could pay them little fees and they'll go and they'll put in the refs to get like the the things that you need the tool set but he's actually the one playing with the tool set so it's kind of like he is best in the world but not putting in all the hours that's how he's able to do that um but in terms of gaming love i think this is this is an amazing thing i think gaming what we've seen with with other models i mean in terms of like gemini is you can actually generate a game with a single prompt and i think that creates a really fun dynamic where you can kind of hyper personalize these experiences gaming is super exciting i hope they do it it's fun it very much aligns with the ethos in terms of my guesses i'm really excited for the integrations i want a desktop app really bad i love the chat gbt desktop app i love how it integrates into the other platforms that i work on it works with the notes app it works with the command terminal. It plugs into a lot of the existing things on the desktop and it just lives in a window that's always open. I feel that if Grok is able to do that, I will then be inclined to use it much more than just when I'm on X.
Ejaaz:
[24:02] Do you think they'll run some kind of personalized version on your desktop in that example, Josh?
Josh:
[24:07] I hope so. I want memory to become a big thing for everybody. And what I like about memory in particularly the case of X is that it has access to all of my posts history. So I have had an account on X or Twitter for I think since 2011. It's been like 15 years almost. And over that time, I don't think anything's really been deleted. So it just kind of has this stream of consciousness over 15 years of my life. That's a huge amount of context that it's not currently able to access. So one thing, and one of the gripes that I have with X currently actually is when you ask it to like index other people's posts or like interpret them or do deep searching, it doesn't really have that capability. If it can do that if it can index all of my posts create a profile for me if it could do that for other people and you could almost interact with these other accounts just based on their like the.
Josh:
[24:55] Generated model of their post. That seems like a really cool thing that we could have. And then the other thing that I'm super excited about that I am like selfishly hoping happens and optimistic that it's going to happen is like rock rolls out in Tesla. I think that's going to be so cool because as someone who drives them around all day, I really want that integration. And the fun thing about integrating an AI model with cars, this will be the first time it ever happens, is you get access to the multimodality of this car as well. So the input sensors, you have GPS, you have sound with microphones, you have vision through the camera array that exists fully around the car. And it can create this like very immersive interactive experience as you're driving places where you can ask it about things that you're seeing, you could ask it about places you're going, where you are, and it kind of becomes this roadside companion. And again, that could feed into the context window in the memory space of your profile. So in the case that they roll out memory, in the case that they roll out like grok in a car, it kind of starts to build this unique profile around you and that stuff seems really exciting and this is just in addition to the benchmarks right where i'm assuming the benchmarks will be great it's going to compete with o3 if not outpace that but it seems less exciting than these actual integrations where we we feel it into day-to-day life right.
Ejaaz:
[26:07] Yeah the the multi-modality point is a really important one because the main thing that drives these ai models is not just how much data you can get but the richness of that data yeah and i kind of define richness by you know how effective the data is at telling you what humans get from their life right so it's like what i see what i hear what i smell and the actions that i do and cars is just one way right like you can follow me out of this apartment that i'm in right now and see what i'm seeing outside of that apartment like where i'm driving to, my kind of habits, oh, he's hitting the gym, oh, he's going grocery shopping, whatever that might be, which might sound boring, but helps the AI build this collective picture of you, this identity about you, right? It made me think of like the Tesla robots that he's launching soon, right? Which, again, sound crazy right now, but I can imagine a world in a couple of years from now where everyone has one of these robots in their homes and they're tidying up and and doing the ironing and making me look, right, whilst I'm filming this episode. Again, another sensory input from all this kind of data into this one AI.
Ejaaz:
[27:20] So aside from that, can I tell you one other moonshot idea that I hope he kind of like, oh, rather than an idea, but something that I hope he kind of like makes a move on where no other AI platform really has. Let's hear it. It's nailing the AI integration into a social media platform.
Ejaaz:
[27:39] Now, OpenAI is a phenomenal product, but it's private. I can't see all the amazing trending prompts that people are doing. Maybe they unlock that in a future thing, but I don't really see them doing that because there's a lot of privacy concerns around that. And it's a great product for what it is, right? I speak to it about all my secrets that I probably wouldn't on a public forum, right? But it's lacking the ability to go viral in terms of network effects. I kind of want to be connected with my friends via this AI in some way.
Ejaaz:
[28:11] Now, Grok being implemented into X has been step one in doing that, right? But you kind of don't have much to do.
Ejaaz:
[28:18] You can add Grok in the replies to people's threads and get some kind of automated response, right? Where it says, oh yeah, this is true. It's mainly used as a fact checker mainly. But I feel like there's a way that you can integrate, maybe it's your own personalized model of Grok that to your earlier point has been trained on your history. You know, you've been tweeting since 2011. So it kind of, it's like Josh's Grok, right? And then it can interact with Ejaz's Grok account, right? and you kind of like have this conversation or we share information amongst each other and then we log in every morning and we're like, oh, cool. Like, this is exactly what I wanted to talk about. And it's thought about it in the way that I wanted to think about it. I don't really know what a social media website's going to look like that integrates Grok directly, a smarter version, this Grok 4 model. But I presume that Elon Musk has that top of mind and the guy that he's just hired, Nikita Beer, is an expert in engineering these social constructs. So it might be too soon to call it, But I'm hoping there's going to be some form of new social media interaction, which directly integrates AI pretty seamlessly so that we go from people knowing what Grok is to just seamlessly interacting with it.
Josh:
[29:26] Directly, that seems right. I think we need to enrich the context of a post in order to get there.
Josh:
[29:32] What Farcaster did for people who are from the crypto space who have used Farcaster, they did really well at integrating mini apps into posts. Where like a single post in the platform could actually, like you could play a game within it, you could send money within it. It was a mini app built within a post. And currently X really supports, it supports multimedia in the sense that you could post a photo, a video, some text, a link, hashtag. That's mostly it.
Josh:
[29:58] I think what happens there and the way you get there is by enriching the amount of data you can put in this post. If you can generate a game using their game engine, you can share the game as a post that's playable within the app. You can share the prompt that is within it. You can kind of track trending prompts, see what's hot, what's not. That seems like a really fun dynamic to enable the world in which you're talking about, where you do have this social media layer applied onto building games and apps and all those things and creating lots of contacts. So i'm sure that's in the pipeline at some point i'm sure that's coming i mean it's important to understand the context of of the window in which x sits in like all the the resources it has available i mean x has xai it has the data within x so it has this like really powerful ai layer it has the tesla universe which has the hardware it has the cars with the robot taxis it has humanoid robots that are incoming it has like the physical manifestation of all this ai and this all kind of sits under one umbrella where it has space exploration there is starlink there are satellites in space whatever that may be used like it has this insane repository of elon's going to build the best.
Ejaaz:
[31:03] Ai model like
Josh:
[31:05] And that's what i'm saying is it's.
Ejaaz:
[31:06] A day a game
Josh:
[31:07] That's crazy yes and and when you judge these things on rate of velocity instead of like day-to-day quality it becomes very obvious that that xai is moving the fastest i mean they were created what less than three years ago whereas open ai anthropic they were all created like nearly a decade or many more years than that. So the fact that they've gotten this good this quickly and they continue to ship at this rate is really high signal that they are going to win at least something big over the course of time. It's like they have the culture. The engineering team is so hardcore so badass they're shipping on saturday nights sunday nights they're working around the clock they have the intelligence to spin up a 200 000 gpu cluster that's coherent in a record amount of time they're buying factories they have tesla power walls to power the factories they have these mega packs and generators they're just kind of throwing everything at the wall and they just have the most resources they have the most velocity i'm stoked like i think whatever happens it's going to be cool grok 4 is just the next step in this this roadmap but like very bullish on the XAI team and that whole universe that exists on top of them. It's going to be fun to watch.
Ejaaz:
[32:12] I couldn't have thought of a better ending to this episode than that, Josh. I don't think there's anything left to be said until 11 p.m. EST tonight when they start streaming that GROC announcement. We'll see you tonight.
Josh:
[32:25] And then we'll also see you tomorrow with our first reactions. To the people listening, this was our first time trying a real-time thing. We actually had a totally different topic today. And Ijaz and I were like, why don't we just cover the current news? So normally we like to do a lot of research a lot of context setting a lot of examples those were lacking but i think this is still kind of interesting so i'm curious your thoughts if you're listening to this like hey do you prefer just like the real-time data we're gonna work really hard to publish this same day or would you prefer a more refined episode on something timely but not the topic of the day we're just experimenting things so hopefully you enjoyed this one uh we certainly did we are stoked for the grok 4 release tonight so stay tuned that's gonna be a big episode tomorrow david should be back for that one he is back from climbing mountain so he'll be joining us tomorrow we're back to the original cast and crew um and it should be pretty cool so if you enjoyed this episode please share with your friends we appreciate that uh like it repost it whatever it helps us out a lot especially because we're a little bit smaller we're trying to get bigger share with everyone let us know what you think and we will see you bright and early tomorrow.
Music:
[33:20] Music
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