With Tesla dealing with declining demand, and the cultural transition to a larger and more stable company, I understand why Elon would peel off AI, finance it with commercially reasonable contracts from Tesla, twitter, and spacex, and boom - you’ve got like the second highest revenue ai company in the world with arguably some of the most valuable proprietary data in the world, especially for the robotics / physical world stuff that’s coming, and it could be operating in that sweet spot he seems to like of massive growth operational + research scale out startup.
I wonder if xai needs custom hardware to win. I don’t think so. But I’m also unsure what winning looks like: AGI? Home assistant robot? Should be a fun five years to see what they end up doing.