CEO & Co-Founder @river_ai_inc. Previously @xAI, Research & Engineering
Palo Alto, CA
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We’re launching River AI, a new AI company with the mission to build AI systems that are owned and shaped by you. I’m extremely excited about what we’re going to ship soon. Check it out!
We are incredibly excited to announce River AI. Our mission is to create personal AI that is owned and shaped by you.
Today’s best AIs are controlled by a few large corporations. We are building the alternative: a new, personal stack for AI that works entirely for you, shares your values, and operates on your terms.
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Today was my last day at xAI, the company that I helped start with Elon Musk in 2023. I still remember the day I first met Elon, we talked for hours about AI and what the future might hold. We both felt that a new AI company with a different kind of mission was needed.
Building AI that advances humanity has been my lifelong dream. My parents left the Russian Federation after the collapse of the USSR in search of a better life for their kids. Life wasn’t always easy as immigrants. Despite the hardships, my parents believed that human values were priceless: values like courage, compassion, curiosity for understanding the world. As a child, I admired scientists like Richard Feynman and Max Planck, who relentlessly pushed the frontiers of physics in order to understand the universe. As a particle physics PhD student at CERN I was excited to contribute to that mission. But the search for new physics was getting harder and harder, requiring bigger and bigger colliders, while new discoveries kept getting fewer. So I began to wonder if superintelligence, not larger colliders, could be the key to unlocking the mysteries of the universe. Could AI develop a consistent theory of quantum gravity? Could AI prove the Riemann hypothesis? In early 2023 I became convinced that we were getting close to a recipe for superintelligence. I saw the writing on the wall: very soon AI could reason beyond the level of humans. How could we ensure that this technology is used for good? Elon had warned of the dangers of powerful AI for years. Elon and I realized that we had a shared vision of AI used to benefit humanity, thus we recruited more like minded engineers and set off to build xAI.
The early days of xAI were not easy. Naysayers told us that we arrived too late to the game, so starting a top AI company from scratch would be impossible. But we believed we could do the impossible. Starting a company from zero required lots of hands-on work. In the beginning I built many of the foundational tools used at the company to launch and manage training jobs. I later oversaw much of the engineering at the company, including Infrastructure, Product and Applied AI projects. xAI’s people are deeply dedicated. Through blood sweat and tears, our team’s blistering velocity built the Memphis supercluster, and shipped frontier models faster than any company in history. I learned 2 priceless lessons from Elon: #1 be fearless in rolling up your sleeves to personally dig into technical problems, #2 have a maniacal sense of urgency.
xAI executes at ludicrous speed. Industry veterans told us that building the Memphis supercluster in 120 days would be impossible. But we believed we could do the impossible. Our goal was to get our training setup running at scale on the Memphis cluster ASAP. Towards the end of our 120 day deadline, we were riddled with mysterious issues with communicating over RDMA between the machines. Elon decided to fly to the datacenter, and we followed. Our infra team landed in Memphis in the middle of the night and got straight to work. After pouring through tens of thousands of lines of lspci output we finally identified a wrong BIOS setting, the root of the problem. Elon was there with us until late into the night. When the training run finally worked, Elon posted our triumph at “4:20am” causing us to laugh out loud. I will never forget the rush of adrenaline that night, and the emotional bonds that we were all in this together. We went to bed feeling like we were living through the most exhilarating time of our lives.
I have enormous love for the whole family at xAI. Our team is truly special - you’re the most dedicated people I’ve ever worked with. Catching up to the frontier this quickly hasn’t been easy. It was made possible by everyone’s diehard grit and team spirit. Thank you to every single person who joined me on this adventure. I want to honor your contributions, your time, your sacrifices, which are never easy. I will always remember working together far into the nights and burning the midnight oil. I will never forget the sacrifices and contributions you’ve made. As I drive away today, I feel like a proud parent, driving away after sending their kid away to college. My heart is brimming with tears of joy, rooting for the company as it grows and matures.
As I'm heading towards my next chapter, I’m inspired by how my parents immigrated to seek a better world for their children. Recently I had dinner with Max Tegmark, founder of the Future of Life Institute. He showed me a photo of his young sons, and asked me “how can we build AI safely to ensure that our children can flourish?” I was deeply moved by his question. Earlier in my career, I was a technical lead for DeepMind's Alphastar StarCraft agent, and I got to see how powerful reinforcement learning is when scaled up. As frontier models become more agentic over longer horizons and a wider range of tasks, they will take on more and more powerful capabilities, which will make it critical to study and advance AI safety. I want to continue on my mission to bring about AI that’s safe and beneficial to humanity. I’m announcing the launch of Babuschkin Ventures, which supports AI safety research and backs startups in AI and agentic systems that advance humanity and unlock the mysteries of our universe. Please reach out at ventures@babuschk.in if you want to chat. The singularity is near, but humanity’s future is bright!
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Example of why @xAI is a truly special place to work at: Recently Elon took the time to hear 5min presentations from everyone at the company about what they are working on, with everyone going into as much technical detail as possible. He gave feedback to every single team member on what they are doing and how to help make Grok better. Elon spent 18 hours total with the team on this. No other leader cares so much about making their team successful, and the results speak for themselves.
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We just turned on Grok Voice for all X Premium users in the separate Grok app (Premium+ and SuperGrok users already had access).
As of today Voice is now powered by a variant of Grok 3 and is much more intelligent.
We also launched an improved voice experience in the latest version 1.0.36 of the app.
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We’ve shipped these highly requested features into @grok:
- Long context
- Image understanding
- Web search results
- Inline citations to sources
- Grok Analysis (summarize conversations and understand posts)
- PDF upload
What else should we add to make Grok more useful?
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xAI ❤️ X
@xAI has acquired @X in an all-stock transaction. The combination values xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion ($45B less $12B debt).
Since its founding two years ago, xAI has rapidly become one of the leading AI labs in the world, building models and data centers at unprecedented speed and scale.
X is the digital town square where more than 600M active users go to find the real-time source of ground truth and, in the last two years, has been transformed into one of the most efficient companies in the world, positioning it to deliver scalable future growth.
xAI and X’s futures are intertwined. Today, we officially take the step to combine the data, models, compute, distribution and talent. This combination will unlock immense potential by blending xAI’s advanced AI capability and expertise with X’s massive reach. The combined company will deliver smarter, more meaningful experiences to billions of people while staying true to our core mission of seeking truth and advancing knowledge. This will allow us to build a platform that doesn’t just reflect the world but actively accelerates human progress.
I would like to recognize the hardcore dedication of everyone at xAI and X that has brought us to this point. This is just the beginning.
Thank you for your continued partnership and support.
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Apply at x.ai/careers if you want to be part of our journey to build AGI and understand the Universe 🛰️
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We’re rebuilding the X recommendation system using our xAI training framework. Join us to make the timeline better: job-boards.greenhouse.io/xai…
You should be seeing subtle improvements to your post recommendations, especially more banger posts from small accounts.
My feed has noticeably improved. Not yet great, but pretty good.
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Yesterday we discovered a bug that caused many people to get answers from Grok 2 instead of Grok 3 even though it said Grok 3 in the app 😬
Please give Grok 3 another chance if you found it to be underwhelming the last time.
Now available for free.
This is it: The world’s smartest AI, Grok 3, now available for free (until our servers melt).
Try Grok 3 now: nitter.app/i/grok
X Premium+ and SuperGrok users will have increased access to Grok 3, in addition to early access to advanced features like Voice Mode
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We don't protect the system prompt at all. It's open source basically. We do have some techniques for hiding the system prompt, which people will be able to use through our API. But no need to hide the system prompt in our opinion.
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Apply to @xAI at x.ai/career if you want to work with the largest and most powerful GPU cluster ever built.
Given the pace of technology improvement, it’s not worth sinking 1GW of power into H100s.
The @xAI 100k H100 liquid-cooled training cluster will be online in a few months.
Next big step would probably be ~300k B200s with CX8 networking next summer.
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Twitter really needs to add the ability to write math formulas in tweets with LaTeX syntax.
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The issue here is that the web is full of ChatGPT outputs, so we accidentally picked up some of them when we trained Grok on a large amount of web data. This was a huge surprise to us when we first noticed it. For what it’s worth, the issue is very rare and now that we’re aware of it we’ll make sure that future versions of Grok don’t have this problem. Don’t worry, no OpenAI code was used to make Grok.
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ChatGPT responses are contaminating every corner of the web, from scientific papers to Amazon reviews. OpenAI seems to be blissfully unaware of the issue.
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Research research research research research research research research research research research research research research research research research research research research research research research research research research research research research research research research research research research research research research research research research research
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A common mistake that AI companies make nowadays is to not give their engineers enough time and mental calm to do their best work. Constant deadlines, pressure and distractions from daily AI news are poison for writing good code and systems that scale well. That’s why most AI APIs and products have reliability issues.
A good company culture that mixes excellence with focus and enough rest leads to faster and better results. The best example of how to do it well is the early Google culture from 1998 which resulted in one of the largest scale and most reliable services on the web in just a few short years. Founders should copy some of the strategies that Larry and Sergey used. They are still underrated IMO despite their huge reputation.
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It’s a good model, sir
Introducing Grok 4, the world's most powerful AI model. Watch the livestream now: nitter.app/i/broadcasts/1lDGLzplW…
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Two things pose an existential risk to humanity: Superintelligent AI and human stupidity; and I’m not so sure about the AI
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Come and work with us on Grok!
We're looking for outstanding backend engineers to help keep Grok performant and reliable. Come work with the best team on the planet!
grnh.se/009500ca7us
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Join us to work on the X/Grok macOS app
Hiring engineers at @xai to help build our Mac product. If you have a track record of writing high-performance Swift and AppKit applications, would love to chat!
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xAI is moving at light speed and there’s a lot of exciting research and engineering work ahead of us. Apply to join the team at x.ai/career
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Grok 2 ties for the second spot on LMSys. Try it out right here on 𝕏!
Chatbot Arena update❤️🔥
Exciting news—@xAI's Grok-2 and Grok-mini are now officially on the leaderboard!
With over 6000 community votes, Grok-2 has claimed the #2 spot, surpassing GPT-4o (May) and tying with the latest Gemini! Grok-2-mini also impresses at #5.
Grok-2 excels in Math (#1), and #2 across the boards (Hard Prompts, Coding, Instruction-following). More plot analysis in 2nd post👇
Huge congratulations to @xAI on this remarkable achievement!
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Grok 2 mini is now 2x faster than it was yesterday. In the last three days @lm_zheng and @MalekiSaeed rewrote our inference stack from scratch using SGLang (github.com/sgl-project/sglan…). This has also allowed us to serve the big Grok 2 model, which requires multi-host inference, at a reasonable speed. Both models didn’t just get faster, but also slightly more accurate. Stay tuned for further speed improvements!
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We've released our first progress update at xAI.
x.ai
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Join the Grok community here on X if you want to help us improve Grok, or to see how others are using Grok. nitter.app/i/communities/17331328…
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I’ve realized that the reason I started to work on AI a long time ago is because I wanted to create miracles.
To create wonderful things that nobody had ever seen before.
But during all the years I’ve worked on AI at DeepMind and OpenAI I’ve learned again and again that nothing we will ever create will come close to the miracle of our own existence.
The human mind is the most intricate and beautiful thing that exists in our world, and the fact that it emerged spontaneously from our universe is truly wonderful.
We must preserve the miracle.
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Join us if you want to run training jobs on 200,000 GPUs. x.ai/careers
This weekend, the @xAI team brought our Colossus 100k H100 training cluster online. From start to finish, it was done in 122 days.
Colossus is the most powerful AI training system in the world. Moreover, it will double in size to 200k (50k H200s) in a few months.
Excellent work by the team, Nvidia and our many partners/suppliers.
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😌 Settings > Privacy and Safety > Mute and Block > Muted words
ALT List of mute words in the Twitter settings: ChatGPT, crypto, web3
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If you want to move past the AI hype and learn some real fundamental basics behind today's learning algorithms there's no better choice than MacKay's "Information Theory, Inference and Learning Algorithms". You can read the book for free on the official website: inference.org.uk/mackay/itil…
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Zero. But we fixed a huge bug in Grok that Elon found during the meeting (there was something wrong with the X post results that Grok returns).
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xAI ships at light speed
We shipped 20 app updates in the last two weeks containing Grok 3, SuperGrok, Think & DeepSearch, and Voice Mode. We're looking to add more hardcore engineers to the team. Tag the most hardcore iOS and Android engineers you know and @xAI will hire them.
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The Grok-1 repo is getting pretty popular. I will be responding to pull requests and issues. Feel free to contribute!
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Grok will usually refuse to pick a side, but you can get it to do so if you explicitly ask it to. It will also output this though, which ChatGPT would never do.
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Grok should be rolled out to every Premium+ subscriber in the US now. If you're on mobile and don't see it, make sure to update and restart the app. Happy Grokking!
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Grok 3 mini is amazing. We’ll release it soon.
Excited to be a member of the amazing team at @xai , and shipping the best grok3!
Thrilled to lead grok3-mini training, and will ship it to all users for free in the coming days! LFG!
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We will dramatically improve Grok over the next few months. This is just the beginning.
Grok has the potential to completely change the way we use X. It should be considered a foundational element of the platform, used to make this social network *aware of what people are saying* for the first time ever
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Try out our voice mode apps.apple.com/us/app/grok/i…
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We will soon have video games that are fully generated by AI. All that's needed is a multimodal model that generates video and audio, takes in keyboard and mouse controls and runs at 30 FPS. This is almost feasible with today's hardware.
Introducing General World Models.
We believe the next major advancement in AI will come from systems that understand the visual world and its dynamics, which is why we’re starting a new long-term research effort around general world models.
Learn more: bit.ly/3RexmuJ
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New model:
x.ai/blog/grok-2
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I’m seeing AI generated posts and replies everywhere now. ChatGPT has a few telltale signs that give away AI generated content. These will soon be post trained away. It’s not about AI content being everywhere, it's about the fact that we’ll soon lose the ability to tell!
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Claiming that OpenAI’s safety culture is better than Anthropic’s is batshit insane.
Where does the gap between perception and reality on AGI company safety come from?
x.ai — Elon is very vocal about safety, but so far, no one at x.ai works on safety.
Anthropic — just released a computer-using agent without any safety mitigations. I can only imagine the negative reactions if OpenAI made a similar release.
OpenAI — on most safety benchmarks, our models are among the safest out there.
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We're releasing PromptIDE, one the internal tools we've built to accelerate our work on Grok. It allows you to develop and run complex prompts in the browser using an async based Python library.
Announcing the xAI PromptIDE
The xAI PromptIDE is an integrated development environment for prompt engineering and interpretability research.
It accelerates prompt engineering through an SDK that allows implementing complex prompting techniques and rich analytics that
visualize the network's outputs.
We originally created PromptIDE to accelerate our development of Grok. It has helped us iterate quickly over different prompts and prompting techniques.
We are now making the IDE available to members of our Grok early access program.
x.ai/prompt-ide
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Fast, cheap, smart. Pick 3.
Meet the Grok 3 family, now on our API!
Grok 3 Mini outperforms reasoning models at 5x lower cost, redefining cost-efficient intelligence.
Grok 3, the world's strongest non-reasoning model, excels in tasks that need real world knowledge like law, finance, and healthcare.
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At xAI everybody works on safety. I have personally red teamed the Aurora model for our release this week. We will take the same approach when dealing with powerful AI systems.
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We’re looking for AI engineers, infra engineers, product engineers, and many more roles!
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Algorithms are also important, and they become increasingly important as the model size increases. I suspect the main reason people haven’t been able to train a better model than Grok 3 is that they didn’t get all the details of the training right. There is a huge amount of important science around scaling models that most people in the field still don’t know despite it being published years ago.
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Hats off to the team that built Aurora
Earlier today, we released a new model, code-named Aurora, that gives Grok the ability to generate extremely photorealistic images (and in the future, even edit them). It's free to use for all of 𝕏, try it out and send us what you're creating!
This model was trained entirely in-house with a very small team, and we're really excited to finally show it off. Shoutout to @gabriel_ilharco @ericzelikman @imhaotian @lm_zheng for helping make the model great, and to the entire product team, especially @512x512, @theVincentStark, @TheGregYang, and @phroo.
It's been really cool watching what folks on 𝕏 are creating with it in just the last few hours. Posting some of our faves in the 🧵 below...
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Join our Android team! This is a huge opportunity to build the best AI app for Android in a small and super talented team.
Grok is seeing tremendous growth in India for our Android app, developed by our 1-man team of @attilablenesi. We are looking to add the second engineer to the team. Apply here: grnh.se/209e0b367us
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I keep revisiting this great paper from @andy_l_jones: “Scaling scaling laws with board games”. It shows how training compute and inference compute of MCTS can be traded off against each other. 10x more MCTS steps is almost the same as training 10x more. arxiv.org/abs/2104.03113
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The French prosecutors have released their charges against Pavel Durov and as expected these are bogus charges which could be applied to any large social media platform. Shameful conduct by the French authorities. Pavel Durov needs to be released immediately. Providing secure means of communication and assembly is not a crime.
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Check out Grok on Vercel
Vercel and @xAI are partnering to bring zero-friction AI to developers.
• Grok models are now available on Vercel
• Exclusive xAI free tier—no additional signup required
• Pay for what you use through your Vercel account
• Zero-config auth, API keys, and env vars
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Try out the improved Voice Mode in Grok
lowkey the best thing about @xai is the Voice Mode.
I got SuperGrok just to test out Grok 4 and do KaraokeBench on Grok 4’s Eve Voice (the one that does opera)
but actually I’m going to keep SuperGrok around because its actually just a much much better voice mode than @chatgptapp
like:
- open straight to voice mode
- SPEED CONTROLS
- MUTE BUTTON
- PROMPTABLE VOICES
- auto suggestions
- interruptions that dont suck
- unhinged mode
this thing is made by people who actually use the product.
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Chat with Zeeshan if you're at CVPR
We are hiring exceptional researchers and engineers at @xAI focusing on multimodal, image/video gen, pretraining to build multi-modal AGI.
If you’ll be at #CVPR this week, please sign up for our coffee meetup! We’d love to hear about the work you’re presenting and share more about our next-gen multi-modal work. Coffee on us :)
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We're starting a new DeepMind research team in California to work on large-scale deep learning models. Apply if you want to contribute to our mission of building AGI!
Interested in exploring the limits of large-scale models? Consider joining our brand new Scalable Deep Learning team in California as a Research Engineer or Research Scientist, see job descriptions below!
boards.greenhouse.io/deepmin…
boards.greenhouse.io/deepmin…
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Grok is out on Android in the US
Grok is now available to all Android users in the US. Go try it out: play.google.com/store/apps/d…
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