I know I'm late to reply, but to explain since many people seemed to be confused by what I said –– I think the speed at which xAI has caught up with the competition from nothing is quite impressive, and the lengths they had to go to to do this, even more so.
Grok is now competitive with the other big players in the foundation model space. To do this they had to recruit some of the top AI talent, speed run the building of massive AI data centers and of course execute well to bring it all together.
All of their competition have either had a time and/or financial advantage over xAI so it's quite impressive what they've managed to achieve given this. Deepseek's achievement in this sense is more impressive so I'm not delusional, but I was still very surprised to see how good Grok 2 was.
I genuinely have no idea what he's done that's incredible. I don't even know what xAI does apart from being a chatbot inside of twitter.