Musk launches 'scary smart' AI chatbot

SAN FRANCISCO: Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company unveiled on Monday (Feb 17) the latest version of its chatbot, Grok 3, which the billionaire hopes will find traction in a highly competitive sector contested by the likes of ChatGPT and China's DeepSeek.

The launch comes as the world's richest man is deploying the enormous powers granted him by US President Donald Trump to restructure and dismantle federal agencies.

The unprecedented cost-cutting drive has raised conflict-of-interest questions, given that many of those agencies have regulatory oversight on elements of Musk's sprawling business empire.

"Grok is to understand the universe," Musk said at the start of the Grok 3 launch presentation.

"We're driven by curiosity about the nature of the universe - that's also what causes us to be a maximally truth-seeking AI, even if that truth is sometimes at odds with what is politically correct."

Musk has promoted Grok 3 as "scary smart," with 10 times the computational resources of its predecessor that was released in August last year.

The flagship product of his xAI company was trained on synthetic data and employs self-correction mechanisms that avoid errors - known as "hallucinations" - that plague some AI chatbots and lead them to process false or misleading data as fact.

"Grok 3 has very powerful reasoning capabilities, so in the tests that we've done thus far, Grok 3 is outperforming anything that's been released, that we're aware of, so that's a good sign," Musk said in a video call last week with the World Governments Summit in Dubai.

Grok 3 will be made available first to Premium+ paid subscribers of X - formerly Twitter, which Musk acquired in 2022 - before rolling out to other users.

The upgraded chatbot enters a crowded field with countries racing to introduce more sophisticated - and cost-effective - AI products.

Chinese startup DeepSeek shocked the global AI industry last month with the launch of its low-cost, high-quality R1 chatbot - a direct challenge to US ambitions to lead the world in developing the technology.

Grok 3 is also going up against OpenAI's chatbot, ChatGPT - pitting Musk against collaborator-turned-arch rival Sam Altman.

Musk and Altman were among the 11-person team that founded OpenAI in 2015. Created as a counterweight to Google's dominance in artificial intelligence, the project got its initial funding from Musk, who invested US$45 million to get it started.

Musk left three years later, and then in 2022 OpenAI's release of ChatGPT created a global technology sensation - one that did not feature Musk at its centre and which made Altman a star.

Their relationship has become increasingly toxic and litigious ever since, with Open AI's board last week rejecting a Musk-led offer to buy out the company for close to US$100 billion.

TRUMP AND TECH

Trump has put technology front and centre of his new administration. Tech billionaires featured prominently at his inauguration and he has announced a number of major AI infrastructure initiatives from the White House.

Musk has become a key figure in the administration, as one of Trump's closest advisers and the head of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which has begun a radical overhaul of the US government bureaucracy.

Critics warn that Musk's proximity to the president poses a major conflict of interest as he guides Trump on laws and regulations around artificial intelligence - just one sector in which he has a substantial commercial stake.

According to Bloomberg, xAI has been canvassing potential investors for a roughly US$10 billion funding round that would value the company at about US$75 billion.

Musk, who also acts as boss of SpaceX and Tesla, launched the xAI company in July 2023, shortly after he signed an open letter calling for a pause in the development of powerful AI models.