Days after sweeping layoffs, Elon Musk vows xAI will match rivals Google, Anthropic and OpenAI this year

Just days after announcing the reorganization of the company and pushing out many of its co-founders, Elon Musk has claimed that xAI will catch up with leading AI labs like Anthropic, OpenAI and Google by this year. The billionaire also went on to add that the company would go on to overtake its rivals by a long distance in the coming three years.

Musk was responding to a post on X by a user who claimed that Anthropic, Google and OpenAI are all tied for the top spot in the AI race, while Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta and Musk’s xAI were both seven months behind each.

“xAI will catch up this year and then exceed them all by such a long distance in three years that you will need the James Webb telescope to see who is in second place,” Musk wrote in response to the post.

Notably, Musk’s xAI had its peak moment late last year when two of the company’s Grok AI models surpassed Gemini and ChatGPT in various benchmarks. However, that victory was short-lived as Google first launched Gemini 3.0 and later Gemini 3.1 models that have been sitting on top of various benchmarks.

Meanwhile, ChatGPT has continued to remain one of the most popular chatbots out there and usually sits a little below Gemini in most rankings, while Anthropic’s Claude has found its niche and is considered a favourite among coders.

In contrast, Musk has looked to exploit the relatively restriction-free access provided by his chatbot for both text and video generations as a way to lure users. That has, however, also landed the company in trouble, case in point being the backlash that xAI faced after Grok generated consensual deepfake images of women and children on X.

Musk restructures xAI:

Earlier this week, Musk said that he is rebuilding xAI from the ground up after the company failed to create a competitive enough coding tool against the likes of OpenAI’s Codex and Claude Code.

The company also pushed out a number of co-founders, with only two of the original 11 co-founders of the AI lab now remaining in the company. Musk also said that he and his colleague, Baris Akis, are now taking a look at the rejected employment applications of the company in order to reach out to promising candidates.

“xAI was not built right the first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up,” Musk wrote on X.

Musk merged xAI with SpaceX earlier this year with the aim of meeting the growing electricity and cooling demands of AI without harming the environment.