We’re feeling cynical about xAI’s big deal with Anthropic
Key takeaways
- Anthropic and x AI announced a big partnership this week, with Anthropic buying all the compute capacity at x AI’s Colossus 1 data center in Tennessee.
- Kirsten did her best to offer “a positive view” on the partnership — after all, it’s a new way for xAI to make money.
- (And then there’s the environmental lawsuit that xAI is facing over Colossus 1.)
Why this matters: a development in AI with implications for how people work, create, and decide.
Anthropic and x AI announced a big partnership this week, with Anthropic buying all the compute capacity at x AI’s Colossus 1 data center in Tennessee.
On the latest episode of Tech Crunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I discussed what the deal might mean for x AI’s parent company Space X, as Space X prepares to go public and apparently plans to dissolve x AI as a separate organization.
Kirsten did her best to offer “a positive view” on the partnership — after all, it’s a new way for xAI to make money. But she also noted that this also suggests xAI isn’t doing much when it comes to training its own frontier AI models, and it’s harder for the company to position itself as a “forward-looking, innovative” business when that’s the case.