Elon Musk praised his upcoming Grok 3 chatbot as an AI model outperforming everything else that’s been released thus far, and said the world would get to see it in a matter of weeks.
“At times I think Grok 3 is scary smart,” Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur and now close adviser to US President Donald Trump, said via video conference at the World Government Summit in Dubai on Thursday.
The wide-ranging conversation spanned Musk’s own work on AI, his simmering feud with former partner Sam Altman at OpenAI, plans to “delete entire agencies” of the US federal government, and futuristic musings on the state of artificial intelligence. At one point Musk joked that he hoped AI years down the road would be kind to humanity.
Musk said the upcoming model from his own company, xAI, was trained on synthetic data and is capable of reflecting on mistakes that it makes by going back and forth through the data in a bid to achieve logical consistency.
‘Final Stages’
“We’re really in the final stages of polishing Grok 3 and probably it gets released in about a week or two so pretty soon,” he said, adding he doesn’t want to be “hasty” in the release of the model.
Musk was interviewed by Omar Al Olama, the UAE’s minister for artificial intelligence and digital economy.
The oil-rich country is making major investments to become a regional heavyweight in AI and has cut ties with China in the sector to assuage Washington’s worries. The UAE’s President Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed met with Trump during his trip to the US last year, where he prioritized conversations around AI.
Musk also took aim at competitor OpenAI, a firm for which he is assembling an unsolicited $97.4 billion bid.
“OpenAI is meant to be open source, non profit and now they changed the name to closed for maximum profit AI,” the world’s richest person told the audience. “They’re after money next level.”
Musk and Altman — who together co-founded OpenAI as a non-profit in 2015 — have been locked in a long-standing feud over the company’s direction. Altman, who is pushing to restructure the company into a for-profit business, has rejected Musk’s offer, calling it a tactic to “slow us down.”
DOGE Cuts
Musk appeared on screen in front of an audience of suited government and business leaders wearing a black t-shirt with the words “TECH SUPPORT” in all capital letters. Musk joked that his main job title now is technical support for the White House.
Musk is head of Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, where he has spearheaded the president’s effort to modernize federal technology and identify spending cuts. Musk has taken credit for billions of dollars in canceled programs and contracts, and pushed a voluntary resignation program for federal workers that, while falling short of its lofty targets, persuaded roughly 3% of the government’s civilian workforce to quit.
The Trump administration, in the first weeks of his second term, has effectively shut down much of the the US Agency for International Development, curbed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and has set its sights on shuttering the Education Department entirely.
“We need to spend less money and get better results,” Musk said, comparing his work to a “corporate turnaround at a much larger scale.”
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