September 24, 2026
The race for models will get tighter: Musk gave SpaceX 6 months to take the lead
On Sep 24, Elon Musk gave SpaceX about 6 months to become an AI leader. He compared SpaceX's three years of effort with Anthropic's six years and OpenAI's ten years. Musk called rapidly bringing compute capacity online the main constraint.
Elon Musk
@elonmusk
1. We will continue accelerating. Our AI efforts are only 3 years old, compared with 6 years for Anthropic and 10 years for OpenAI. If our second derivative remains strong, SpaceX will become a leader in about 6 months. 2. When intelligence greatly exceeds the level needed for a class of tasks, further growth becomes pointless. A toaster does not need Newton-level intelligence, and it would be cruel to put it there. 3. Hardware is hard. Rapidly bringing enormous compute capacity online is incredibly difficult. SpaceX has already shown it can do this, and it will keep getting better.
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xAI publicly launched on Jul 12, 2023, and SpaceX acquired it on Feb 2, 2026. This combination now includes Grok Build, a terminal AI agent powered by Grok 4.7 for macOS, Linux, and Git Bash.
A point of comparison. The Grok 4.7 API offers a 500,000-token context window and costs $2 per 1 million input tokens and $6 per 1 million output tokens. It can now be compared with Codex and other coding agents, while leadership in six months remains Musk's promise.
Musk's stated deadline ends in Mar 2027.
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