xAI

xAI is an artificial intelligence company founded by Elon Musk in 2023, with a team of researchers from labs like Google DeepMind and OpenAI. Musk had been one of OpenAI's co-founders and later became one of its loudest critics; xAI was his way of building a direct competitor. Its main product is Grok, a family of large language models and the chatbot of the same name.

Grok's distinctive feature is its home: it lives inside X, the social network formerly called Twitter, and can read posts in real time to answer questions about what is happening right now. It also has its own app and website, generates images and video, and is sold to developers through an API. To train it, xAI built Colossus in Memphis, Tennessee, one of the largest clusters of NVIDIA GPUs in the world, put together in a matter of months.

The company's structure has changed fast. In 2025 it merged with X, so the chatbot and the social network became one business. In 2026 SpaceX acquired it, and it now operates as a SpaceX subsidiary under the name SpaceX Super Intelligence. Grok has repeatedly drawn criticism for offensive answers and for generating sexual deepfakes of real people, and Colossus for the pollution from the gas turbines that power it.