Musk himself alluded to this in the Fridman interview.
“You’re hoping for [Grok 3] to be state-of-the-art?” Fridman asked.
“Hopefully,” Musk replied. “I mean, this is the goal. We may fail at this goal. That’s the aspiration.”
There could be other reasons for Grok 3’s delay. xAI has a much smaller team than many of its rivals, for one. Nonetheless, the slipped launch time frame adds to the body of evidence that conventional AI training approaches are running up against a wall.