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- Elon Musk addressed xAI staff during an all-hands last week, several sources with knowledge of the meeting said.
- Musk said xAI will beat competitors if it can survive the next two to three years.
- Musk highlighted xAI's rapid data center growth and funding access.
Elon Musk appears to be feeling upbeat about the future of his AI company.
At a companywide meeting at xAI's San Francisco headquarters last week, Musk told staff that if the company could survive the next two to three years, xAI would triumph over its competitors, several sources with knowledge of the meeting said.
The xAI CEO said that the company's ability to rapidly scale its power and data capacity would be a key ingredient in the race to achieve superintelligence — which surpasses human intelligence — and become the most powerful AI company.
Musk said that xAI could achieve artificial general intelligence, which matches or exceeds human intelligence, in the next few years, even as soon as 2026, sources said.
Musk said in November that xAI had a 10% likelihood of achieving AGI with its Grok 5 model, which he has said the company plans to release early next year.
The CEO also told staff that xAI would have an advantage over other AI companies because it would have access to around $20 billion to $30 billion in funding per year, and it could benefit from its proximity to his other companies, sources said. Tesla integrated Grok into its vehicles earlier this year.
Overall, workers said Musk appeared happy with the company's progress. One insider described the meeting as "peppy."
Musk also theorized about building data centers in space and his plans to colonize Mars, the sources said. He said that Tesla's Optimus humanoid robot could eventually man such extraterrestrial data centers, the people said.
Musk has previously said that Optimus could provide support for SpaceX missions as soon as next year. Google CEO Sundar Pichai and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have publicly talked about the possibility of building data centers in space, though Pichai acknowledged that it is a "moonshot."
In response to Business Insider's request for a comment, the company responded with an automated message: "Legacy Media Lies."
Over the past year, xAI has rapidly expanded the footprint of its data centers, a project it has named Colossus. Earlier this year, the company said it had around 200,000 GPUs, and Musk has said it plans to expand to 1 million GPUs.
xAI is one of many companies racing to build AGI and justify valuations worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Despite Musk's outsize profile, xAI is still a relatively new player in a race dominated by giants like OpenAI and Google.
The AI race shows no signs of slowing down. Earlier this month, OpenAI entered a state of emergency as it raced to push out its latest model, according to reports. Google released a new Gemini model in November, and xAI has pushed new versions of Grok in rapid succession.
During the all-hands, xAI leads demonstrated several updates to existing products, such as Grok Voice, the company's app for Tesla owners, and its agents, sources said. Some of the updates included improvements to Grok's ability to predict outcomes, better listening functions for Grok voice, and video editing, the people said.
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