Its very simple, xAI needs money to win the AI race, so best option is to attach to Elon’s moneybank (spacex) to get cash without dilution

> win the AI race

I keep seeing that term, but if it does not mean "AI arms race" or "AI surveillance race", what does it mean?

Those are the only explanations that I have found, and neither is any race that I would like to see anyone win.

Big tech businesses are convinced that there must be some profitable business model for AI, and are undeterred by the fact that none has yet been found. They want to be the first to get there, raking in that sweet sweet money (even though there's no evidence yet that there is money to be made here). It's industry-wide FOMO, nothing more.

It’s a graft to keep people distracted and allow for positioning as we fall off the end of the fossil energy boom.

Being too far ahead for competitors to catch up, similar to how google won browsers, amazon won distribution, etc

A significant number of AI companies and investors are hoping to build a machine god. This is batshit insane, but I suppose it might be possible. Which wouldn't make it any more sane.

But when they say, "Win the AI race," they mean, "Build the machine god first." Make of this what you will.

It’s a framing device to justify the money, the idea being the first company (to what?) will own the market.

Remember how he argued for Tesla’s Solarcity acquisition because solar roofs?

Data centers in space are the same kind of justification imo.

Solar roofs are much more practical to be honest.

Putting solar roofs on a building? For a car company?

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> xAI needs money to win the AI race

Off on a tangent here but I'd love for anyone to seriously explain how they believe the "AI race" is economically winnable in any meaningful way.

Like what is the believed inflection point that changes us from the current situation (where all of the state-of-the-art models are roughly equal if you squint, and the open models are only like one release cycle behind) to one where someone achieves a clear advantage that won't be reproduced by everyone else in the "race" virtually immediately.

the truth is that this is the only thing they know how to do

They ultimately want to own everyone's business processes, is my guess. You can only jack up the subscription prices on coding models and chatbots by so much, as everyone has already noted... but if OpenAI runs your "smart" CRM and ERP flows, they can really tighten the screws.

If you have the greatest coding agent under your thumb, eventually you orient it toward eating everything else instead of letting everybody else use your agent to build software & make money. Go forward ten years, it's highly likely GPT, Gemini, maybe Claude - they'll have consumed a very large amount of the software ecosystem. Why should MS Office exist at all as a separate piece of software? The various pieces of Office will be trivial for the GPT (etc) of ten years out to fully recreate & maintain internally for OpenAI. There's no scenario where they don't do what the platforms always do: eat the ecosystem, anything they can. If a platform can consume a thing that touches it, it will.

Office? Dead. Box? Dead. DropBox? Dead. And so on. They'll move on anything that touches users (from productivity software to storage). You're not going to pay $20-$30 for GPT and then pay for DropBox too, OpenAI will just do an Amazon Prime maneuver and stack more onto what you get to try to kill everyone else.

Google of course has a huge lead on this move already with their various prominent apps.

That may be the plan, but this is also a great way for GDPR's maximum fine, based on global revenue, to bite on SpaceX's much higher revenue. And without any real room for argument.

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