Connect with us

Elon Musk

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

Credit: Elon Musk | X

Published

on

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”

Advertisement

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.

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.

Advertisement

xAI supercomputer in Memphis to be upgraded to 1 million GPUs

Need accessories for your Tesla? Check out the Teslarati Marketplace:

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.

Advertisement
Comments

Elon Musk

Elon Musk’s answer to Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey got way more specific

Published

on

By

Elon Musk escalated his monthslong feud with Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey this week, pledging that his own AI video tool will produce a competing version before the year is out. Responding to a fan-made, AI-generated clip of the ancient epic, Musk wrote on X, “Before this year ends, Grok Imagine will make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer.”

In June, Musk quoted an xAI-shared trailer built entirely with Grok Imagine Video 1.5, a two-minute-plus reimagining of The Odyssey styled after a 1970s classical Hollywood epic, and predicted “full movies by the end of the year,” as Teslarati reported at the time. That trailer, built from 36 consistent shots by a single creator, was Musk’s proof of concept. This week’s pledge turns that prediction into a specific commitment, tied directly to Homer’s text rather than a generic demo.


When a fan separately proposed that Musk fund a live-action alternative, to “give Mel Gibson $100 million to film an Odyssey adaptation with painstakingly historically accurate ships, armour, weapons, and casting, with all dialogue taken straight from the original poem and delivered in Homeric Greek,” Musk replied with two words: “I’m down.”

The Grok Imagine pledge lands as the tool’s underlying infrastructure has changed hands. Grok is no longer a standalone product, it folded into SpaceXAI after SpaceX’s acquisition of xAI closed in February, meaning the compute behind any Odyssey production traces back to the same Colossus supercomputers now bundled into SpaceX’s pitch to investors. Musk has separately said SpaceX’s own engineering data is being fed into the next major Grok training run, a two trillion parameter model he’s called the “2T run.”

Advertisement

Whether Grok Imagine can sustain a feature length narrative, rather than a series of impressive individual shots, remains the open question.

Continue Reading

Elon Musk

Tesla Semi finally has an FSD timeline and it’s waiting on the Cybercab

Elon Musk told investors Semi self-driving should start working by early 2027, per today’s earnings.

Published

on

By

During Wednesday’s’ Tesla Q2 earnings call, an analyst asked Elon Musk when Tesla would look at autonomy for the Semi. His answer set a real timeline for the first time, noting that self-driving on the Tesla Semi is expected to start working “around the end of this year or early next year”.

Musk framed the delay as a matter of priority, not capability. Tesla’s self-driving team is currently focused on Model 3, Model Y, and Cybercab, the vehicles that make up the overwhelming majority of Tesla’s fleet. Since Semi trucks on the road remain a small fraction of that total even after the recent Nevada factory ramp, Musk said it made more sense to keep the software team’s attention on what he called “the march of nines of safety” for the higher volume vehicles first. Autonomous Semi development is “taking a bit of a backseat for the next six months or so,” he said, before adding that it “will definitely be working next year and in time for the scale-up to high production of the Tesla Semi.”

Tesla Semi’s official battery capacity leaked by California regulators

The timeline lines up with what’s already been showing up on public roads. In June, a Tesla Semi was spotted in Sunnyvale wearing a full validation rig, the same rooftop sensor array Tesla mounts on vehicles ahead of an FSD milestone.

A second unit was seen near Fremont days later with a matching camera suite and lens washers. Separately, Tesla analyst Nic Cruz Patane posted video this month of the production Semi’s exterior camera array, ten AI4 based units built directly into the truck rather than added later.

Advertisement


Musk also gave the reason autonomy on the Semi matters in the first place, a persistent shortage of qualified truck drivers. “There is a really serious shortage of truckers,” he said on the call, framing a self-driving Semi as important both for addressing that shortage and for improving safety and comfort for the drivers running the truck today.

The timing also tracks with the Semi’s production reality. Tesla’s Q2 shareholder letter, dropped language promising the Semi would reach volume production this year. Musk pointed to 4680 battery cell output as the near-term constraint on Semi and Cybercab production. A software timeline landing in early 2027 gives Tesla’s autonomy team room to work while the hardware ramp catches up behind it.

It’s worth nothing that this isn’t necessarily a promise the Semi ships driverless next year. Musk’s own language, self-driving “working” by early 2027, describes internal validation catching up to hardware already riding on every production truck, not a public unsupervised rollout.

Advertisement
Continue Reading

Elon Musk

Tesla is about to make parking in busy lots less stressful than ever

Published

on

Tesla FSD 14.3 [Credit: TESLARATI)
Tesla FSD 14.3 [Credit: TESLARATI)

Tesla is about to make parking in busy parking lots at businesses and other points of interest less stressful than ever by allowing drivers more control over where they park and how, CEO Elon Musk confirmed on X.

Tesla has been working to improve the parking performance of vehicles utilizing the Full Self-Driving suite, but now it is looking to add more customization, allowing drivers to choose the specific space they park in, but also potentially the orientation the car pulls into the spot:

Musk has reiterated on X twice over the past several weeks that Tesla is working to make things with the FSD suite based more on the driver’s specific preferences and behaviors that were seen in past drives.

Advertisement

Essentially, it sounds like if you tend to park away from a business to avoid other vehicles, Tesla FSD will soon recognize that preference of yours and start parking further away as well. Additionally, the prospect of assigned parking spaces has been something many owners have voiced concerns about.

Living in a community with assigned parking spaces makes using FSD incredibly difficult as it will rarely park in the correct spot when there are so many to choose from. This is also pertinent in work settings where there are sometimes assigned parking spaces.

The updates to Tesla’s Full Self-Driving suite in terms of listening to driver preferences with parking are also extending to routing. Tesla announced yesterday that with the release of its 2026 Summer Update, it was adding Automatic Navigation and Preferred Routes:

Tesla reveals 2026 Summer Update with crazy fixes to Nav and more

Tesla has always maintained the idea that any human input is bad input, and that, ideally, Tesla Full Self-Driving will always make the right decision. Of course, this is all in theory, but the issue is that so many of Tesla’s interventions have come because it does something that is not necessarily wrong, but perhaps not what the driver would prefer.

Advertisement

Taking these preferences into account will help Tesla alleviate some of the potentially unnecessary interventions that drivers perform.

Continue Reading