Musk personally shared an update on Grok 4.8: pretraining is complete, and it’s now in the reinforcement learning phase. Evaluation scores are still climbing, and a limited trial for Bot users is planned for later this week.
What’s even more striking is what’s under the hood: JAX and SGLang have both been ditched, and the training and inference stack has been rewritten from scratch in C/C++. My take: the whole industry relies on off-the-shelf frameworks for convenience, while Musk insists on making his own bricks and building his own tower. That means speed and the ceiling are entirely in his hands, but the trade-off is that you could count on one hand the number of people in the market who can work with this stack. The bet is on xAI’s engineering obsession.
For comparison, in crypto: BTC is at $68,534, down 6.89% in a day; ETH is at $1,928, down nearly 6%; and the Fear and Greed Index is at 20, deep in extreme fear territory. The AI side is still furiously competing to build better models, while crypto has already taken a hit. I’m inclined to think short-term market sentiment is in control—no matter how strong the models are, they can’t rescue today’s market. $BTC
What’s even more striking is what’s under the hood: JAX and SGLang have both been ditched, and the training and inference stack has been rewritten from scratch in C/C++. My take: the whole industry relies on off-the-shelf frameworks for convenience, while Musk insists on making his own bricks and building his own tower. That means speed and the ceiling are entirely in his hands, but the trade-off is that you could count on one hand the number of people in the market who can work with this stack. The bet is on xAI’s engineering obsession.
For comparison, in crypto: BTC is at $68,534, down 6.89% in a day; ETH is at $1,928, down nearly 6%; and the Fear and Greed Index is at 20, deep in extreme fear territory. The AI side is still furiously competing to build better models, while crypto has already taken a hit. I’m inclined to think short-term market sentiment is in control—no matter how strong the models are, they can’t rescue today’s market. $BTC
