Welcome to the Tech Meme 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? Andre Karpathy is going to tell us. 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.
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-40 and Google's Gemini, can analyze images and respond to questions, and powers a number of features on Musk's social network X.
Grok3, which has been in development for several months, was optimistically slated for release in 2024 but missed that deadline. Mondays is an ambitious launch. XAI has been using an enormous data center in Memphis containing around 200,000 GPUs to train Grok3.
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... Grok2, Musk said during a livestream presentation on Monday, it's a maximally truth-seeking AI, even if that truth is sometimes at odds with what is politically correct, end quote.
Grok3 is a family of models, to be precise. A smaller version of Grok3, Grok3 Mini, responds to questions more quickly at the cost of some accuracy. Not all the models and related features of Grok3 are available yet. Some are in beta, but they began... rolling out on Monday. XAI claims GROC3 beats GPT-40 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, end quote.
Indeed, XAI says Grok 3 outperforms Gemini 2 Pro, Deep Seek V3, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and GPT-40 in some benchmarks. During the reveal, Elon himself said, the mission of XAI and Grok is to understand the universe.
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? 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 year after raising it to $22 per month in December 2024 following Grok3's launch. But as TechCrunch notes, XAI is putting some... of Grok3'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 Grok 3 a leap forward in AI? The great Andre Karpathy had a lengthy post on X describing what it's like to use. He says its thinking capability feels state-of-the-art and rivals OpenAI's O1 Pro models. Deep Search offers a blend of search and reasoning and more, quoting from pieces of his lengthy ex-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, FlashThinking, and Claw do not. I uploaded GPT-2 paper. I asked a bunch of simple lookup questions. All worked great. Then asked to estimate the number of training flops it took to train GPT-2 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 Ryman hypothesis when asked to, similar to DeepSeek 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 O1 Pro capability and ahead of DeepSeek 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 slash perplexity called deep research together with thinking, except instead of deep research, it is deep search.
can produce high-quality responses to various researchy-slash-lookupy 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 1 and 2?
The impression I get of DeepSearch is that it's approximately around perplexity Deep Research's 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, e.g. it too incorrectly. excludes XAI as a major LLM labs when I tried it. Grok3 does know there are three R's in strawberry, but then it also told me that there are only three L's in Lollapalooza. Turning on thinking solves this.
As far as a quick vibe check over around two hours this morning, Grok 3 Plus thinking feels somewhere around the state-of-the-art territory of OpenAI's strongest models, O1 Pro at $200 a month, and slightly better than DeepSeek R1 and Gemini 2.0 FlashThink.
Which is quite incredible considering that the team started from scratch around one year ago. This timescale to state-of-the-art territory is unprecedented. Do also keep in mind the caveats. The models are stochastic and may give slightly different answers each time. It's very early so we'll have to wait.
for a lot more evaluations over a period of the next few days slash 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.
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 tri-fold 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. 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-sized 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 foldable.
phone will be thinner than Huawei's when shut, helped by having only two panels rather than three, end quote. 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 the...
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 2232x1008 panels when closed up, expanding to a 10.2-inch display with 2232x3184. 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.
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First sign that those tariffs are going to hit some technology gadgets. Acer CEO Jason Chen says the company will probably raise U.S. 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 continued.
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 U.S. 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 products 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. Acer's 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 US 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 Suskever'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 investors.
investors 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. 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, says Skever 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. he helped Altman 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 shipped 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 Bhandari, a fellow with Carnegie India. It's a big signal to other companies that you can do business with some ease here. 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 Chilean
relationship between Beijing and New Delhi. In 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 noticed, 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 imports.
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 base there to rival its vast network in China. The iPhone's 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.
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 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 8 p.m. Eastern, 5 p.m. Pacific. Join us. It's a listener call-in 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.