This is so in character for Musk and shocking because he's incompetent across so many topics he likes to give his opinion on. Crazy he would nerf the model of his AI company like that.
It’s been said here before, but xAI isn’t really in the running to be on the leading edge of LLMs. It’s serving a niche of users who don’t want to use “woke” models and/or who are Musk sycophants.
Even if the flimsy benchmark numbers are higher doesn't necessarily mean it's at the frontier, it might be that they're just willing to burn more cash to be at the top of the leaderboard. It also benefits from being the most recently trained, and therefore, most tuned for benchmarks.