Elon Musk

Musk turns up in AI news in three roles that often pull against each other. He co-founded OpenAI in 2015, left the board in 2018, and has been in litigation and public conflict with the company since. He owns X, formerly Twitter, which supplies both a distribution channel and training data. And he founded xAI, the lab behind the Grok models, which he runs in direct competition with the labs he helped start.

For readers, the useful habit is to separate his announcements from his shipping record. Musk publicises training runs, cluster sizes and timelines on X well before anything is verifiable, and his stated dates have historically been optimistic. The clusters, on the other hand, are real and unusually large, which is why claims about xAI’s compute get taken seriously even when the schedules do not.