Why xAI and Anthropic’s New Products Matter

If you’ve been on X at all in the last few days, you’ve probably come across posts in which people described jailbreaking xAI’s new Grok 3 model. For instance, one person asked the chatbot how to make chemical weapons, while another revealed instructions xAI gave the model to stop it from saying that Elon Musk is the top spreader of misinformation on X.

For all the attention these posts might have drawn, they’re a little besides the point. Most developers I’ve spoken with say the latest xAI model is nearing the performance of models from bigger AI rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic in tasks like coding and math problems. That’s quite an accomplishment, given xAI is less than two years old. And it strengthens the argument that large language models are becoming a commodity. In other words, in the long term, no single AI developer will be able to race far ahead of everyone else when it comes to quality.

As a result, AI developers need to do something different to stand out. That includes developing applications they can sell to consumers and businesses, not just selling access to models through an application programming interface—a topic we covered in Monday’s issue. In tech lingo, this strategy is called “moving up the tech stack.”