FILE PHOTO: An AI engineer working at Elon Musk’s xAI has resigned after posting on X that the yet-to-be released, Grok 3, model is not as good as OpenAI’s ChatGPT o1, o1-Pro or o3-mini models at coding.
| Photo Credit: Reuters
An AI engineer working at Elon Musk’s xAI has resigned after posting on X that the yet-to-be released, Grok 3, model is not as good as OpenAI’s ChatGPT o1, o1-Pro or o3-mini models at coding. Benjamin de Kraker, working on Grok models, said that he refused to delete the post and chose to resign.
According to his LinkedIn profile, Kraken had been working at xAI for 6 months. In the X post, Mr. Kraken said he was reprimanded for announcing Grok 3 publicly while Mr. Musk himself has spoken about the upcoming AI model several times on X.
The rankings he posted were entirely his “personal opinion,” Kraken argued. “I do not know where Grok 3 will stack up against other SOTA models. Hopefully it does well, I don’t know. That’s why it says ‘opinion’ and ‘to be determined.’ It will probably be pretty good at some things and imperfect at others. I didn’t think this was a particularly wild opinion,” he noted.
However, multiple X users replied to Mr. Kraken’s post saying any company wouldn’t appreciate an employee undermining the performance of an unreleased model.
It has been reported that Grok 3 is close to release. Earlier this month, Mr. Musk said that the model’s pre-training phase is over.
Kraken’s post comes amid Mr. Musk’s unsolicited offer to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to buy the AI non-profit. Mr. Musk had led a consortium to make a $97.4 billion bid to buy OpenAI which Altman subsequently refused.
Published – February 12, 2025 04:10 pm IST
