Brian McCullough (0:04)

Welcome to the Techmeme ride home for Tuesday, February 18th, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough. Today Xai and Elon Musk have launched Grok3, their new cutting edge AI model. Is it really a step forward? Is it really the cutting edge? Andrej Karpathy is going to tell us the first tri foldable phone is here, is there a huge new AI player and how Apple's move to manufacture in India is going. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech foreign last night, Elon and Xai launched Grok 3 beta and Grok 3 mini, their latest AI models with reasoning trained on 200,000 GPUs or 10 times more compute than Grok 2. Available now for X Premium plus users quoting TechCrunch Grok Xai's answer to models like OpenAI's GPT 4.0 and Google's Gemini can analyze images and respond to questions, and powers a number of features on mobile. Musk's social network X Grok 3, which has been in development for several months, was optimistically slated for release in 2024 but missed that deadline. Monday's is an ambitious launch. XAI has been using an enormous data center in Memphis containing around 200,000 GPUs to train Grok 3. In a post on X, Musk claimed Grok 3 was developed with 10x or so more computing power than its predecessor Grok 2, using an expanded training set that includes filings from court cases and more. Grok 3 is an order of magnitude more capable than Grok, musk said during a live stream presentation on Monday. It's a maximally truth seeking AI, even if that truth is sometimes at odds with what is politically correct. Grok3 is a family of models. To be precise, a smaller version of Grok 3. Grok 3 mini responds to questions more quickly, at the cost of some accuracy. Not all the models and related features of Grok 3 are available yet. Some are in beta, but they began rolling out on Monday. Xai claims Grok3 beats GPT4O on benchmarks including AIME, which evaluates a model's performance on a sampling of Math questions, and GPQA, which assesses models using PhD level physics, biology and chemistry problems. An early version of Grok 3 also scored competitively in Chatbot Arena, a crowdsourced test that pits different AI models against each other and has users vote on their preferred responses, according to Xai. Indeed, Xai says Grok 3 outperforms Gemini 2 Pro, DeepSeek v3, Claude 3.5 and GPT4O, and some benchmarks. During the reveal, Elon himself said the mission of XAI and Grok is to understand the universe and explaining that he wants to answer questions like what's going on? Where are the aliens? What is the meaning of life? How does the universe end? How did it start? End quote XAI also unveiled Deep Search, a reasoning chatbot that explains its thought process for queries and is capable of doing research, brainstorming and data analysis. Now, perhaps on account of all this, X raised its Premium plus subscription to $40 per month or $395 per, raising it to $22 per month in December 2024 following Grok 3's launch. But as TechCrunch notes, Xai is putting some of Grok 3's features behind a separate Super Grok plan available through the Grok app, so only some features like Deep Search and reasoning will be available to premium plus plan users. End Quote Is Grok3 a leap forward in AI? The great Andrej Karpathy had a lengthy post on X describing what it's like to use. He says it its thinking capability feels state of the art and rivals OpenAI's 01 Pro models. Deep search offers a blend of search and reasoning and more Quoting from pieces of his lengthy x post. Grok3 clearly has an around state of the art thinking model and did great out of the box on my Settlers of Catan question. Few models get this right reliably. The top OpenAI thinking models EG01 Pro at $200 a month get it too, but all of Deepseek R1, Gemini 2.0, Flash thinking and Claw do not. I uploaded GPT2PA, I asked a bunch of simple lookup questions, all worked great. Then asked to estimate the number of training flops it took to train GPT2 with no searching. This is tricky because the number of tokens is not spelled out, so it has to be partially estimated and partially calculated, stressing all of lookup knowledge and math. I like that the model will attempt to solve the Riemann hypothesis when asked to similar to deep seq R1 but unlike many other models that give up instantly. I had to stop it eventually because I felt a bit bad for it, but it showed courage and who knows, maybe one day. The impression overall I got here is that this is somewhere around 01 pro capability and ahead of deep seq R1, though of course we need actual real evaluations to look at. Deep Search is a very neat offering that seems to combine something along the lines of what OpenAI perplexity called deep Research together with thinking. Except instead of Deep Research it is Deep Search can produce high quality responses to various researchy look up Y questions you could imagine having answers in articles on the Internet, things like what's up with the upcoming Apple launch? Any rumors? Why is Palantir stock surging recently? White Lotus 3? Where was it filmed and is it the same team as seasons one and two? The impression I get of Deep Search is that it's approximately around Perplexity Deep Research offering, which is great, but not yet at the level of OpenAI's recently released Deep Research, which still feels more thorough and reliable, though still nowhere perfect. For example, it too incorrectly excludes XAI as a major LLM labs. When I tried it, Grok3 does know there are three Rs in Strawberry, but then it also told me that There are only three Ls in Lollapalooza. Turning on thinking solves this as far as a quick vibe check over around two hours this morning, Grok3 thinking feels somewhere around the state of the art territory of OpenAI's strongest models, 01 Pro. At $200 a month and slightly better than Deepseek R1 and Gemini 2.0 flash thinking, which is quite incredible considering that the team started from scratch around one year ago. This time scale to state of the art territory is unpreced. Do also keep in mind the caveats. The models are stochastic and may give slightly different answers each time. And it is very early, so we'll have to wait for a lot more evaluations over a period of the next few days weeks. The early LM arena results look quite encouraging indeed. For now, big congrats to the XAI team. They clearly have huge velocity and momentum and I am excited to add Grok3 to my LLM council and hear what it thinks going forward. End Quote the first ever tri foldable phone is here. Why just fold your phone in half when you can fold it and unfold it three ways? Huawei has launched the Mate XT globally for €3,499 after its launch in China in September 2024. Quoting the Verge, Huawei's Trifold Mate XT phone is launching outside of China, but it won't come cheap. The world's first and only phone that folds at two separate points in the display costs €3,499, about 3,660 dol and like other Huawei phones, won't officially support any Google apps. The Mate XT launched in China in September 2024. It features a dual hinge folding display that gives users three different screen configurations, a 6.4 inch panel when closed, a 10.2 inch tablet size screen when fully opened, and a 7.9 inch display when only partially unfolded. The Tri Fold is also impressively thin at just 3.6 millimeters thick at its thinnest point when open. That's even thinner than the upcoming oppo find N5, which is also being promoted as the world's thinnest fold. That phone will be thinner than Huawei's when shut, helped by having only two panels rather than three and quoting Android. Central foldables have gotten much better in the last two years, and I enjoyed using the Honor Magic V3 and Pixel 9 Pro Fold in recent months. While each iteration brings thinner designs, better cameras and bigger batteries, the underlying foundation is broadly unchanged. That's what makes the Huawei Mate XT such a unique device. The Tri fold nature of the Foldable means you can use it as three different devices, a regular phone fold out device and a full fledged tablet once it's extended all the way. The design is distinctly unique, and while other brands are set to launch their own take on Huawei's idea sometime later this year, there isn't another device like the Mate XT right now, end quote. And quoting the register in terms of specifications, the Mate XT has the equivalent of a 6.4-inch screen with a resolution of 2232 by 1008 panels when closed up, expanding to a 10.2-inch display with 2232 by 3184 pixels when fully unfolded. The phone uses Huawei's proprietary Kirin 9010 processor, 16 gigabytes of memory and 256 gigabytes to 1 terabyte of flash storage as well as 5G. It supports Wi Fi 7 and has a 50 megapixel camera and weighs about 300 grams, end quote. I like having a secret weapon when I go into some sort of a business negotiation situation and ace in the hole if you will, an advantage in my back pocket. That's how Mack Weldon thinks about clothing as a secret weapon. 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Timeline is offering 10% off your order of Mitopure. Go to timeline.com ride that's T-I M E L-I-N E.com ride first sign that those tariffs are going to hit some technology gadgets. Acer CEO Jason Chen says the company will probably raise US laptop prices by 10% by default from March 2024 due to Trump's tariff on Chinese imports. Quoting Tom's hardware, we will have to adjust the end user price to reflect the tariff, chen said to the Telegraph. We think 10% probably will be the default price increase because of the import tax. It's very straightforward. The Acer CEO continue the decision to increase prices was reportedly confirmed last week, with the Taiwanese tech giant remaining unaffected by tariffs on products that left China before February. Therefore, stock hitting US channels afterward will be subject to increased tariffs. Acer's most expensive laptop on sale, the Acer Predator Triton 17 inch gaming laptop is currently $3,799 at Best Buy, but next month that price is set to increase to 4,178 if increases are passed directly to consumers. It's unclear if the blanket price rise will also affect currently sitting on shelves, but it's likely that as new stock arrives, older stock will also be subject to the price increase. Chen notes that the incoming tariff may offer an excuse for others in the segment to raise prices by more than 10%. No other PC manufacturer has made a public statement regarding the incoming tariffs and inevitable price rises. Acers shifted the assembly of its desktop PCs away from China during Trump's previous term and says it is, quote, looking at different supply chains beyond China, with US Production one of the options being considered. The Consumer Technology association claims that 80% of U.S. laptop imports currently come from China and that the incoming tariff could set U.S. customers back a collective $143 billion, hurting sales. Moreover, the benefits to U.S. industry may be meager, with U.S. production forecast to rise by only 8% and prices potentially rising by up to 45%, end quote. Do we have another huge player in the AI space? Sources say Ilya Suskever's startup Safe Superintelligence, is raising more than $1 billion at a more than $30 billion valuation, led by Green Oaks Capital, which plans to invest $500 million, quoting Bloomberg. The round marks a significant valuation jump from the $5 billion that Suscover's company was worth before, according to Reuters, which earlier reported some details of the new funding. The financing talks are ongoing and the details could still change. The company previously raised money from including Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz. Green Oaks declined to comment. Representatives for Suskever didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. Suskever, a researcher who was instrumental in developing OpenAI's technology and served as its chief scientist, left the company in May. One month later, he co founded Safe Superintelligence, or ssi, with Daniel Gross, a venture capitalist who previously worked on AI efforts at Apple, as well as Daniel Levy, a former OpenAI researcher. SSI focuses on developing safe AI systems. It isn't generating revenue yet and doesn't intend to sell AI products in the near future. This company is special in that its first product will be the Safe Superintelligence and it will not do anything else up until then, suskever told Bloomberg in June. It will be fully insulated from the outside pressures of having to deal with a large and complicated product and having to be stuck in a competitive rat race. Suskever was a key figure in the ouster of OpenAI chief executive officer Sam Altman in 2023 before he helped Alt return. End quote. Finally today, the Financial Times takes a look at Apple's quiet pivot to India, where Foxconn now makes the iPhone 16 Pro. Sources say China views Apple's growing business in India with suspicion. For India, it is an important shift. Mobile phones have now surpassed Diamonds as the country's biggest product export. And although only around 15% of Apple's iPhones are currently made in India, this is expected to increase to 25% by 2027, according to JP Morgan and Bank of America analysts. Globally, the company ships some 232 million iPhones in 2024, according to the International Data Corporation. If you have an anchor firm like Apple coming in and placing eggs in the India basket, that's a positive sign, says Kurnak Bandari, a fellow with Carnegie India. It's a big signal to other companies that you can do business with some ease here, and also establishes a strong linkage with a downstream manufacturing firm, which wasn't the case earlier. For Apple's chief executive, Tim Cook, the geopolitics surrounding the shift are tricky. Apple, which is intensely secretive about its supply chain, needs to be wary of antagonizing China, on which it still overwhelmingly depends. Complicating matters further is the chilly relationship between Beijing and New Delhi and a sign of the secrecy and political sensitivities. Officials in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu refer to Apple, even in private conversations, as the fruit company. It's very hard to build 35 million fewer phones in China and not be notice, but they are doing it in the least public way possible, says Wamsi Mohan, senior equity research analyst with bank of America. Nevertheless, Apple's growing business in India is viewed with suspicion in China. Beijing has recently hampered the movement of some Chinese technicians and capital goods into India, hitting Foxconn and other electronics producers, according to Indian and Chinese officials. The return of Trump to the White House, already firing salvos at China with a 10% tariff on import, underlines why Apple needs to diversify its supply chain and manufacturing, a business strategy known as China plus one. The stakes of Apple's relationship with India are also high for the Modi government, which is under pressure to create sorely needed jobs. With unemployment hovering at about 10% and millions of young people about to enter the labor force, the clock is ticking. Anger over the issue during last year's election led to Modi's party being reduced to a minority for the first time in a decade and forced into a coalition. But if Apple is to put down deep roots in India, it will need a supply space there to rival its vast network in China. The iPhones currently made in India are still largely assembled using flown in parts. To become more ambitious and bolster Apple's long term presence, manufacturers of components will have to be lured to the country with similar revenue opportunities as those found in China. Other aspects of Apple's success in China, notably a steady supply of mobile and trained female workers, is also proving challenging to replicate in India. Apple does have keen and powerful partners, though. Tata, a leading flag bearer of Indian business, is positioning itself as Apple's first full service supplier in India. But the 157-year-old group is a relative newcomer to electronics and will need to evolve quickly to make the partnership a success. Apple will face a few key challenges, including finding suppliers with the expertise it needs and building the flexible workforce it has in China with the ability to flex up and down by many tens and thousands of workers, says Chris Miller, the author of Chip War. It will also take time for relevant government authorities in India to figure out how Apple works, and vice versa, and for both sides to develop the kind of conversations over regulatory issues that Apple has had in China. End quote. Okay, heads up. We're going to record the 2000th episode spectacular on Thursday night at 8pm Eastern, 5pm Pacific. Join us it's a listener call in Episode Episode. I'll have more details for you to join tomorrow, but for now mark your calendar and join us on Thursday night at 8pm Eastern, 5pm Pacific. Talk to you tomorrow.