'Smartest AI on Earth' to be unveiled on Monday

WASHINGTON: Elon Musk said his startup xAI will release its Grok 3 chatbot on Monday and billed it as the "smartest AI on Earth" in a fiercely competitive market.

The company's flagship artificial intelligence product will go live with a demonstration on Monday night at 8:00pm Pacific time (0400 GMT), the tech billionaire wrote on Saturday on his social media platform X.

Grok 3 was trained on synthetic data and is capable of reflecting on errors it makes by going over data in order to reach logical consistency.

"Will be honing product with the team all weekend, so offline until then," said Musk, the world's richest person and a top adviser to President Donald Trump who is tasked with slashing government spending.

Musk said last week that Grok 3 was in the final stages of development and would be released to the world in a matter of weeks.

xAI is seeking a competitive edge in a market teeming with products like OpenAI's ChatGPT as artificial intelligence spreads through contemporary life.

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

DeepSeek quickly overtook ChatGPT in downloads on the Apple app store.

Musk has repeatedly warned that AI poses a risk to human civilisation, but he is nonetheless pushing hard for a bigger slice of investment in the sector.

xAI said in December it raised $6 billion in its latest funding round from investors that included US venture capitalists, chipmakers Nvidia and AMD, and investment funds from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, among others. It raised an initial $6 billion in May.

The company is now one of the world's most valuable startups, though still dwarfed by OpenAI.

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

OpenAI's board chairman on Friday said it has unanimously rejected a Musk-led offer to buy the company for $97.4 billion.