"Musk's Grok-3 vs Altman's GPT-4.5: The AI Arms Race Heats Up"

The AI arms race has reached a new level with the upcoming launch of Grok-3 by Elon Musk's xAI, which promises to be "scary smart" and outperform existing models. Musk's announcement on X has sparked a response from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who claims that their upcoming model, GPT-4.5, is tantalizingly close to achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

Musk has hyped Grok-3, stating that it outperforms anything released to date. The model will be unveiled in a live demo on Monday night at 8 pm PT. Experts and AI enthusiasts are eagerly awaiting the release, as it could put significant pressure on the AI industry. Meanwhile, OpenAI is reportedly moving up the timeline for GPT-4.5 to steal Musk's thunder.

OpenAI's GPT-4.5, codenamed Orion, represents the company's last "non-chain-of-thought" model before unifying its AI capabilities in GPT-5. It has been trained using synthetic data from the o1 reasoning model, which could explain the AGI-like qualities Altman reported. Grok-3, with its powerful reasoning capabilities, seems to follow a similar path.

However, not everyone is buying the hype. Benjamin De Kraker, an xAI employee, quit last week after the company threatened to fire him for ranking Grok-3 below ChatGPT-o1 and ChatGPT-o3 in coding performance. The ranking sparked immediate backlash from xAI leadership, despite Elon Musk's comment that it was weird.

A prominent leaker known as "@Iruletheworld" claimed that Grok-3 would "blow your goddamn mind" and represents AGI. xAI employee Frederik Meringdal even suggested that Grok-3 is beyond AGI, reaching Artificial Super Intelligence. The rivalry between Musk and Altman has deep roots, with Musk leaving OpenAI in 2018 and attempting to acquire the company earlier this year. The dispute has since spawned legal action, with Musk suing OpenAI over its Microsoft partnership.