My honest read is that, having everything — the data centers, the compute, the models (however misaligned they might be), the only thing xAI is missing is users. They don’t have any users because the only people who use Grok are essentially Elon’s fanboy club, and all they pretty much do with it is ask it to generate arguments to win their Twitter threads or nonconsensually unclothe people. Cursor gives xAI a captive audience of users; most sophisticated users don’t use it anymore, so anyone left is unlikely to be opinionated when models are shifted to Grok. Marriage made in heaven.
>the only people who use Grok are essentially Elon’s fanboy club
that's not true, Grok compelling feature is it's capabilities, performance and price. You only get comparable prices with GPT-5.4 mini or Gemini Flash. Also Grok Voice and images are pretty good.
I think at this point they don't want to be at the same level as Opus or GPT, they found their niche.