I think whatever’s going on at xAI will probably be featured in a wolf of wall street type video someday.
Their developments make zero sense.
Grok used to be open-weights, and kinda garbage. Then Deepseek V3 came out. Suddenly, Grok was smart. But no longer releasing their weights (or any model info).
Grok Image used to be barebones Flux1. xAI acknowledged this at the time. After Kontext was released by BFL (creators of Flux1), suddenly Grok can edit images. But it’s “Grok Image” now.
Grok Video is the worst offender. It released shortly after the WAN2.1 weights were open-sourced, and was a carbon copy of it - except it knew what a cybertruck was. Same framerate, same artifacting, same everything.
Then the WAN2.2 weights were released, and suddenly Grok Video had a massive upgrade. Out of nowhere.
Keep in mind this was after Veo3.0, and not far off from Sora 2. xAI, with their monstrous gpu capacity, should be directly competing. But there’s not even a research paper. The upgrade remains in-line with WAN 2.2.
MM-Audio starts getting popular as a tool for adding audio in post to non-video models. Once again, it’s all open weights - and suddenly, Grok has audio. But it’s not very good. Much like MM-Audio.
Recently, LTX-2 debuted, bringing video with audio to the masses with an open weights release. A few days later, Grok Video suddenly has full audio capability. And a bunch of other capabilities which shipped with LTX-2, like longer video durations and far greater support for a wide range of aspect ratios.
So, what’s actually going on? How was xAI so shockingly far behind Google and OpenAI for video, yet managed to catch up exactly when open source/open weights models got released to the public?
How did they even manage to be around for so long without contributing a single research paper to the industry?
It’s genuinely as if there’s one dude sitting there with a big collection of videos, waiting to fine-tune them on top of open source models the moment they get unveiled. And given xAI have so much GPU compute available, they’d be able to fine-tune a model extremely fast.
fwiw, there’s nothing wrong with fine-tunes; that’s how 99% of the world “creates” their own models at home.
But the key word is “at home”. As in, you DON’T have billions of dollars and a supposed expert r&d team with access to one of the world’s largest compute clusters.
I’ve always been shocked at how low quality most of Grok’s stuff is compared to SOTA providers - but the recent video leap following on a few days after the LTX-2 release just makes for way too many coincidences in a row.
I genuinely think all those GPUs are mostly sitting idle except for inference, and a quick fine-tune when there’s a new open source/open weights model to try pass off as your own.
My personal market signals: keeping a watchful eye on telegram groups for shit-tier exchanges.
You know it's really bad when even the scammers aren't pretending to be happy
lmao, cz with his “woe is me” shtick.
Man acting like he didn’t make billions from obliterating the entire bull run on 10/10.
He caused losses exceeding 3 times that of FTX (low estimates), and genuinely thinks the animosity he’s seeing is “a coordinated attack”.
Absolute fucking grifter.
FC’s pivot to a dev-oriented ecosystem under @neynar is actually a sign of the times.
This never would’ve been possible in the past. Reality is the entry barrier was always too high for a social network focused around builds.
AI has lowered that barrier enough to make it possible for the first time in history imo.
Exciting af times ahead imo
(will be more regular on fc again soon, knee deep in builds atm)
Done a lot of cooking this month.
Stuff arriving soon.
And by “stuff” I mean “The Sora 2.0 of nsfw video models” and Jesus will be questioning me on this one come Judgement day
Twitter account ImagineRed has some (VERY NSFW) previews if you’re inclined
(also family friendly stuff coming soon but later)
IMGN has a $10k business sub to X.
At one point we also paid $5k/monthly for API access.
Their business/priority support responses are either automated, or literally blank.
One of the many reasons why we build for Farcaster over X.
https://x.com/imgn_ai/status/2015121763206562249
Very long shot here
But I don't suppose anyone on FC knows an actual human being who works at X?
We've been getting stonewalled by automated responses for months.
https://x.com/imgn_ai/status/2014819426541986083
I pledge to develop more unhinged shit (to help make Farcaster a fun place).
Can you pledge that your most unhinged and bullish days are still to come?
Can @neynar also purchase the rights to Adobe Flash, and bring back flash games on farcaster?
We just didn't know how good we had it in the era of flash games. Literally some of the finest games ever created, and they were made for gd free
Man this is a surprise to be sure - I always assumed Neynar was much smaller than FC 😬
Neynar team are incredible though. I feared it being bought out by Base and just turned into TBA2.0 with content coins galore.
I think we'll see a new golden age under Neynar. @rish is a pure builder archetype, and has always taken the time to offer unheard-of levels of support to myself whenever I was launching anything.
Inclusive of when I accidentally went around 74,000% over my Neynar compute capacity, and he didn't send leg breakers after me 🫣
Much love to @dwr and team for building and stewarding FC for so many years, can't wait to see the next chapter.
As some of you may or may not know, I do a lot of image and video model training for a certain AI platform (or platform(s)).
I’ve just spent the last few hours having to sort, prompt, and generate nsfw furry videos as a result of this.
Before I keep contemplating just killing myself, can anyone tell me what the attraction is?
Like, do furries no longer see the cat or the rabbit or whatever is being denigrated? Or do they actually see it and that’s part of the kick?
..and even at that, why is nothing like.. normal? Or like, contextually normal? There’s never like, a missionary position. It always has to be some creature taking 300 penises at once in their ear canal or some shit.
Holy fuck I need a holiday, and a considerably higher paycheque. If my GPU could talk it’d beg for the sweet release of death.
