From a technical standpoint xAI is basically Gemini team B who were give A+ salaries to join the company.

But even then, I suspect their hands were tied in some areas because Elon had some expectations from his AI.

Did Google outbid Elon for team A? Or A team just don't like Elon?

It's an internal jokes since very few high profile Deepmind engineers accepted his offer despite some serious cash being thrown at them.

Meta engineers on the other hand, couldn't wait to jump ship. But that only reinforces the B team theory.

LLaMA was pretty good at the time