Research|The 12-Day AI Celebration by OpenAI and XAI 1,000,00K GPU cluster

OpenAI's Roadmap and xAI's Ambitious Play: The Battle for AI Dominance

The 12-Day AI Celebration by OpenAI

OpenAI has announced the "12 Days of OpenAI" event, kicking off on December 5, 2024. This initiative, informally referred to as "shipmas," will feature daily livestreams showcasing a mix of significant product launches and incremental updates, underscoring OpenAI's drive for innovation and engagement.

A key highlight of the event is the anticipated release of Sora, OpenAI's cutting-edge text-to-video AI tool. Developed over the course of 2024, Sora has been tested in a limited, invite-only research preview involving select artists. Despite its potential, the project has sparked controversy, with some artists voicing concerns over unpaid contributions to its development. Additionally, the departure of Tim Brooks, a key team member, to join Google has added to the challenges facing Sora. Looking ahead, OpenAI is reportedly working to integrate video generation into its multi-modal foundation model. This suggests that Sora might evolve into a feature embedded within a broader multi-modal system rather than remain a standalone product.

Another highly anticipated unveiling during the event is a new reasoning model, potentially the full version of "O1." While official details are sparse, this model is expected to significantly enhance problem-solving capabilities. Furthermore, OpenAI plans to release a robust suite of developer tools alongside the O1 model, including fine-tuning capabilities, function calls, and features for balancing inference speed with reasoning complexity.

Other potential release including advanced voice mode, a new agent platform (better than GPT store!), updated version of GPT 4o, Dalle 4 or equivalent, new search mode, cursor-alike coding tool, etc. However, it is unlikely OpenAI will release a full version of GPT5/Project Orion. We believe GPT5 is still being upgraded with better synthetic data and more advanced post-training at this stage.

As OpenAI gears up to increase its monthly subscription fee to $200, businesses must carefully evaluate the return on investment (ROI) of utilizing the AI tool to replace human labor. The new pricing structure positions OpenAI's offering well above the cost of many sophisticated SaaS products in the market.

The "12 Days of OpenAI" event reflects the organization’s commitment to advancing its technology while fostering a deeper connection with its user community. Each day’s announcements are poised to provide valuable insights into OpenAI’s latest innovations and future direction.

Interestingly, it seems OpenAI is investing heavily to build a developer ecosystem around the OpenAI platform, rather than Azure GPT API offering. One hypothesis is that OpenAI is preparing for a potential "breakup" with Microsoft to maintain independence.

XAI 1,000,00K GPU cluster

Elon Musk's AI startup, xAI, is making significant strides in artificial intelligence development, particularly with its ambitious expansion of the Colossus supercomputer and the advancement of its AI models. We expect XAI could advance from Tier 1.5 to Tier 1 in the foundation model marathon match in 2025. Therefore, there will be four super players: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Deepmind and XAI.

Colossus Supercomputer Expansion

xAI plans to expand its Memphis-based supercomputer, Colossus, from its current capacity of approximately 100,000 GPUs to over one million GPUs. This expansion aims to enhance xAI's competitiveness against leading AI firms like OpenAI. The project involves collaborations with Nvidia for GPU supply and server assembly.