xAI's 'smartest AI on Earth' arrives

PLUS: Mistral releases specialized regional AI model

Author

Rowan Cheung
February 18, 2025

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Elon Musk’s xAI just introduced the world to its next-gen Grok-3 model family — taking center stage in the AI race merely within two years of its existence.

But, with OpenAI and Anthropic circling the waters with releases of their own, will Grok-3's self-proclaimed ‘smartest AI on Earth’ title stand for long?

In today’s AI rundown:

  • Elon Musk and xAI’s next-gen Grok-3

  • Mistral’s first region-specific AI

  • Run AI models locally for autocomplete code

  • The New York Times’s AI for newsroom

  • 4 new AI tools & 4 job opportunities

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

XAI

Image source: xAI

The Rundown: Elon Musk and just xAI unveiled Grok-3 as ‘the smartest AI on Earth’ — achieving SoTA performance across math, science, and coding tasks and outperforming Gemini-2 Pro, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and GPT-4o on key benchmarks.

The details:

  • The main Grok-3 model is being rolled out slowly via the Grok app, and a smaller Grok-3 mini version promises faster responses.

  • Both models topped the AIME‘24, GPQA, and LiveCodeBench benchmarks, with an early version of Grok-3 ranking #1 on Chatbot Arena.

  • The models also have reasoner variations, where they ‘think through’ problems like OpenAI’s o3-mini and DeepSeek R1. They also support deep research.

  • The models have been trained on 10x more compute than Grok-2, using xAI’s Colossus supercomputer with 200,000 H100 GPUs (proving scaling laws hold).

Why it matters: Grok-3 positions two-year-old xAI at the top of the AI race. But, it will be interesting to see how long its leadership lasts as OpenAI gears to launch GPT-4.5, followed by a unified GPT-5. Anthropic, DeepMind, and Chinese players like Alibaba and DeepSeek are also taking major strides in the domain.

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MISTRAL

Image source: Mistral

The Rundown: French AI startup Mistral just released Mistral Saba, a language model designed for Middle Eastern and select South Asian regions — marking the company’s first push into localized AI tailored for specific cultures and nuanced linguistics.

The details:

  • Saba is a 24B model trained on Middle Eastern and South Asian datasets, offering faster and more cost-efficient performance than larger models.

  • The model supports both Arabic and South Indian-origin languages like Tamil and Malayalam, addressing cross-regional linguistic and cultural needs.

  • Saba is designed for conversational AI and culturally relevant content creation, enabling more natural engagement of Arabic-speaking audiences.

  • It is available via API and via local deployment, with Mistral also revealing work on custom models for strategic enterprise customers.

Why it matters: The race for the biggest and best general model is always on and garnering the headlines, but smaller, specialized systems are also seeing massive improvements — with particular value for regions with languages and nuances that aren’t always covered thoroughly in major datasets.

AI TRAINING

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to create your own private AI coding assistant by combining Ollama's local models with the CodeGPT extension for autocompletion and chat capabilities.

  1. Download and install Ollama, then run ollama run deepseek-coder:base in your terminal.

  2. Install the CodeGPT extension from your VS Code's marketplace

  3. Enable auto-completion in CodeGPT settings and select the Ollama model you downloaded.

  4. Start coding and use Tab to accept AI suggestions!

Pro tip: Download additional models like deepseek-r1:14b for more advanced chat-based assistance when needed.

PRESENTED BY INNOVATING WITH AI

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The 6-month program delivers:

  • Proven frameworks for client acquisition and service delivery

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  • Students who land their first AI client in as little as 3 days

THE NEW YORK TIMES

Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown

The Rundown: The New York Times is making a significant transition to allow the use of AI tools in its newsroom, utilizing both external and internal tools to assist with tasks like SEO headlines, editing, summaries, and product development.

The details:

  • AI can now be used for SEO, brainstorming, research, and social, but is still prohibited for drafting articles, image generation, and other editorial tasks.

  • Tools like GitHub Copilot, Google’s Vertex AI, NotebookLM, and OpenAI’s non-ChatGPT API are available under NYT’s approval.

  • The paper also introduced Echo, an in-house AI summarization tool designed to condense articles, briefings, and interactive content.

  • The shift comes as NYT remains locked in a copyright lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging the company improperly trained models on Times content.

Why it matters: It’s been a rocky relationship between major publishers and AI, but it is inevitable that nearly every outlet will shift policies to take advantage of the productivity increases that the tech brings. Other notable pubs using AI are Financial Times, Vox Media, Axel Springer, and the Associated Press.

QUICK HITS

  • 📖 Perplexity Deep Research - Generate in-depth research reports in minutes

  • 🤖 ChatGPT 4o - New upgraded model with upgrades to creative writing, coding, instruction following, and more

  • 🗣️ Nova-3 by Deepgram - New voice AI model for real-time multilingual transcriptions in real-world enterprise use cases

  • 📣 SEO AI Agent - Automate your entire SEO workflow with AI

OpenAI founder Ilya Sustkever’s SSI is reportedly in talks to secure over $1B in funding, set to reach a valuation of over $30B just months after its launch.

Nous Research released DeepHermes-3, an 8B parameter open-source model featuring a toggle to balance reasoning and speed for different use cases.

OpenAI published a guide to prompting its o-series reasoning models, emphasizing simpler, more direct approaches over traditional instructions.

SoftBank’s Arm is reportedly planning to develop its first in-house AI chip with Meta slated as an early customer, a major shift from its traditional licensing model.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted that testers of GPT-4.5 have had “feel the AGI” moments, with hype continuing to build for a potential launch of the new model.

Chinese AI startup DeepSeek suspended its chatbot app downloads in South Korea after regulators raised concerns about data privacy practices.

COMMUNITY

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Rowan, Joey, Zach, Alvaro, and Jason—The Rundown’s editorial team

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