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Elon Musk says xAI’s Grok 3 model will launch this week

Credit: Elon Musk | X

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Elon Musk teased the next version of xAI’s Grok model over the weekend, saying that it will be launched to the public in the next few days.

On Saturday evening, Musk posted on his X account that xAI plans to launch Grok 3, the AI model’s next generation, on Monday night at 8:00 p.m. Pacific. The company will hold a live demo for the launch, which is likely to be hosted on X. He also said that Grok is the smartest AI on Earth, adding that he plans to log offline until the demo to help the team get the new product ready for release.

In the past, Musk has teased on X that Grok 3 will add certain datasets to the model’s training set, including “all court cases,” which he says will “render extremely compelling legal verdicts.”

Here are a few other examples Musk has shared in recent weeks that show off some of Grok 3’s capabilities:

“Testing Grok 3 int4 inference”

Credit: Elon Musk | X

“Grok 3 is so based”

Credit: Elon Musk | X

Credit: Elon Musk | X

READ MORE ON XAI: Elon Musk’s xAI gets investment from Nvidia in recent funding round: report

Musk’s xAI first released a beta version of its Grok-2 model in August, before launching the company’s first public image generation in December. Later that month, xAI officially made Grok free for all X users, after previously only opening the model to those who were subscribed to Premium Plus on the social media platform.

The company is also reportedly working on a dedicated app for Grok, which will no longer require users to utilize X for access to the AI model.

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The AI venture was first launched in July 2023, after Musk in 2015 helped to found OpenAI, the Sam Altman-led AI firm that the xAI CEO later left in 2018. The launch of Grok 3 also comes just a week after a group of investors led by Musk reportedly put in a $97.4 billion bid for control of OpenAI.

Musk has been critical of Altman and OpenAI’s shift from a non-profit to a for-profit model, with the xAI CEO responding to the reports on X by calling him a “Swindler” and “Scam Altman.” Last March, xAI also open-sourced Grok’s weights and architecture, after which Musk also requested on X that Altman tell the public more “about the ‘open’ part of OpenAI.”

What are your thoughts? Let me know at zach@teslarati.com, find me on X at @zacharyvisconti, or send us tips at tips@teslarati.com.

xAI supercomputer in Memphis to be upgraded to 1 million GPUs

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Zach is a renewable energy reporter who has been covering electric vehicles since 2020. He grew up in Fremont, California, and he currently lives in Colorado. His work has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, KRON4 San Francisco, FOX31 Denver, InsideEVs, CleanTechnica, and many other publications. When he isn't covering Tesla or other EV companies, you can find him writing and performing music, drinking a good cup of coffee, or hanging out with his cats, Banks and Freddie. Reach out at zach@teslarati.com, find him on X at @zacharyvisconti, or send us tips at tips@teslarati.com.

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Elon Musk

The real reason Elon Musk wants every car connected to space

Elon Musk says all cars will eventually need Starlink to handle massive AI bandwidth demand.

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Elon Musk is making the case that satellite internet, not fiber or cellular towers, will end up wired into every car on the road. In a string of posts on X, the SpaceX CEO wrote that all cars will have Starlink in the future and called satellite connectivity the only way to get super high bandwidth to billions of vehicles.

The posts started with Musk endorsing a Cloudflare forecast that traffic generated by autonomous AI agents will soon dwarf traffic generated by humans browsing the internet, a shift he described as not a close call at all. From there he narrowed the argument to infrastructure, writing that the only system that can support the insanely fast bandwidth growth needed by AI is Starlink, before extending the logic to cars specifically.


The timing lines up with Tesla’s own hardware decisions. On July 20, Tesla confirmed the Cybercab would ship with a Starlink V5 terminal built into its roof, the first time the company had put satellite hardware in a production vehicle. A day later, Tesla’s head of AI, Ashok Elluswamy, explained the connection wasn’t there for safety and that Cybercab’s driving stack runs entirely on onboard cameras and compute, while the satellite link exists for navigation, customer service, and fleet management instead. Musk followed with his own post about the feature, saying riders would be able to watch 4K streaming video during rides.

By July 22, Musk had already said Starlink would extend beyond Cybercab to Tesla’s full lineup. Sunday’s posts push that same logic outward again, this time framed as a requirement across the industry rather than a feature specific to Tesla, and tied directly to the bandwidth AI systems are expected to consume.

SpaceX’s newest Starmind will make earth data centers obsolete

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The AI argument has been building on SpaceX’s side for months. The company has an FCC filing pending for a third generation Starlink constellation, and it has separately proposed Starmind, a constellation of up to a million satellites designed to run AI computation directly in orbit rather than just relay data. Musk has said he expects space to become the cheapest place to deploy AI compute within two to three years. Starlink and Starmind serve different jobs inside that vision, one moving data and the other processing it, but Sunday’s posts treat vehicles as one more category of hardware that will eventually need both.

None of this changes anything for Tesla owners today. Cars already on the road keep running on LTE and Wi-Fi, and Tesla hasn’t outlined a retrofit path for existing vehicles. The July 22 commitment applies to future production, not the fleet already delivered. What Musk added on Sunday is the reasoning: satellite connectivity isn’t a Cybercab novelty, it’s a bet that ground based networks won’t keep up with how much data cars, robots, and AI systems are about to generate.

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Inside Tesla’s secretive $10 Billion “Project Crystal Sun” filing

Tesla filed for a $10.1 billion Fort Bend solar factory, but the site isn’t confirmed.

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Tesla has filed paperwork in Texas for a second massive manufacturing project in the same week it locked down its chip fabrication site, this time for a $10.1 billion solar cell plant in Fort Bend County. The filing, submitted July 22 under the state’s Jobs, Energy, Technology and Innovation Act and first surfaced by Sawyer Merritt on X, lists an internal project name of “Project Crystal Sun” and targets a site off FM 762 and FM 1994 near Richmond, about 40 minutes outside Houston.

The application, prepared by Kroll Tax Services on Tesla’s behalf, spans five parcels totaling roughly 3,000 acres within the Lamar Consolidated Independent School District. Tesla wants a 10 year property tax limitation in exchange for the investment, split as $1.5 billion in real property and $8.6 billion in equipment and personal property. The company projects 9,712 permanent jobs once the plant reaches full operation, with 1,147 peak construction jobs during a build window running from this year through 2028 and commercial operations targeted for the first quarter of 2029.

Tesla is not fully committed to Fort Bend County yet. The filing states the company is weighing the site against an unnamed out of state alternative, and frames the tax abatement as what would make Texas competitive against that option. If the district and county decline the incentive, Tesla says it may build elsewhere.

Tesla Megapack Megafactory in Texas advances with major property sale

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The plant would handle the full solar cell production chain in one facility, according to the filing, covering wafer and ingot manufacturing, coating, metallization and printing lines, cell testing, automated material handling and cleanroom infrastructure. That scope points to Tesla vertically integrating a part of its supply chain it currently sources largely from overseas partners, mirroring the approach behind its expanding Megapack production in Brookshire, Texas, where Tesla has already built out two buildings for its grid battery business.

The timing lines up closely with Tesla and SpaceX’s other big Texas commitment this month. SpaceX confirmed its Terafab chip factory would land in Grimes County days before this filing surfaced, with construction on that $16.8 billion project starting almost immediately after local officials met with residents. Terafab is meant to produce the AI chips running Tesla’s Optimus robots and Full Self-Driving software, while a solar cell plant would feed a different part of the business, the panels and storage systems Tesla sells to homeowners, businesses and utilities, and increasingly needs to power its own data centers.

Musk has talked about building domestic solar manufacturing capacity before, tying it to the amount of power Tesla’s AI ambitions will require.

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The Boring Company’s newest tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla parts and no one is driving it

The Boring Company’s new tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla Model 3 batteries and drive units.

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The Boring Company just introduced a new piece of hardware, and it runs on parts pulled straight from a Tesla showroom. Liner Truck 3, unveiled in a post from the tunneling company’s official X account, is an all electric vehicle built around Tesla Model 3 battery packs and drive units, purpose built to move concrete tunnel segments to the boring machine face without a single person underground.

The job itself is unglamorous but critical. Each precast segment run weighs more than 22,000 pounds, roughly the load of a full cement mixer, and Liner Truck 3 hauls that weight repeatedly between the surface staging area and wherever the Prufrock machine happens to be cutting.

The Boring Company said Liner Truck 3 is piloted remotely out of its Global Operations Control Center in Texas, extending the Zero-People-In-Tunnel approach the company has spent years building toward. An earlier version of a ZPIT liner truck was already tested at the company’s Bastrop, Texas research tunnels, and a factory tour released last month showed an employee flying a fully loaded liner truck with a PlayStation controller. Liner Truck 3 looks like the production version of that same idea, cleaned up and pushed into daily use.

The timing lines up with a company digging in more places than it ever has before. The Boring Company now has multiple Prufrock machines active or arriving in Nashville, where Music City Loop construction has been accelerating since February, and its Vegas Loop network keeps adding tunnel mileage on a near monthly basis. Every one of those projects depends on getting concrete segments to the cutting face fast enough to keep the boring machine from idling, which is exactly the bottleneck Liner Truck 3 is designed to remove.

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It also reinforces something Tesla owners have watched happen gradually across Musk’s companies: passenger car hardware finding a second life in heavy equipment. Model 3 drive units already move people through the Vegas Loop, and now the same components are hauling concrete underground in Nashville and wherever The Boring Company digs next. Whether that kind of component reuse extends further into TBC’s equipment lineup, or into other Musk owned industrial hardware, is the next thing worth watching.

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