Reading the signal in Grok Bot's shift to a multi-model strategy
The author argues that Grok Bot acknowledging Opus 5.5 as the strongest model and dropping a pure in-house approach signals strong growth numbers, Musk's belief that early leadership matters, and new deals with Suno and Midjourney.
This is a really big deal, mostly because of what it signals. Some thoughts 👇 Obviously Elon is not happy that Opus 5.5 is the absolute best model right now (i'm sure he's riding the model team hard), but he accepts that there is no contest for Opus 5.5 rn. The alternative strategy is to stubbornly keep vertically integrating. This is still *obviously* the best long term strategy, so this indicates his belief in this product category. Worth the short term adjustment. That tells you something about i) the growth numbers of grok bot and ii) his belief that winning early matters for this market. Competition is high but grok bot can stay ahead. OpenAI botched their Dots launch, Anthropic doesn't have one yet, and Instinct is dangerous with the new funding (they could win and then be bought by openAI). Elon is pissed he's behind in AI, and this is the first time he has a best-in-ai-category product. As I've shared before, i think Grok bot is easily the best in their category, the cursor team cooked hard. Unlocking Suno and Midjourney is very cool. These don't have official API products! He just went and got those deals done (they will make the product much better). Even though this sounds like "we're neutral now", to me it seems that he's hyper-focused on beating openAI. I am guessing this personal. I don't think many founders are able to make a choice like this. It's extremely Elon coded. Can you imagine OpenAI or Ant doing something like this? Impossible imo.
This post quotes another post: x.com/elonmusk/status/2107724314451878104