Elon Musk says Grok 3 in final stages, outperforming all chatbots

By Yousef Saba

DUBAI (Reuters) - Elon Musk said on Thursday his AI chatbot, and ChatGPT challenger, Grok 3, is in the final stages of development and will be released in about a week or two.

"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," he said in a video call addressing the World Governments Summit in Dubai.

The billionaire tech mogul founded xAI as a challenger to Microsoft-backed OpenAI and Alphabet's Google. Musk also co-founded OpenAI.

On Monday, a consortium of investors led by Musk said it had offered $97.4 billion to buy the assets of OpenAI's nonprofit, in another salvo from the world's richest man against the artificial intelligence startup.

OpenAI has said it wants to become a for-profit organization to secure the capital needed for developing the best AI models.

Musk sued OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and others in August and has asked a U.S. district judge to block OpenAI's attempt to transition to a for-profit entity. OpenAI said this week Musk's bid clashes with his lawsuit.

"I think the evidence is there in that OpenAI has gotten this far while having at least a sort of dual profit, non-profit role. What they're trying to do now is to completely delete the non-profit, and that seems really going too far."

Musk, who was appointed by U.S. President Donald Trump to oversee the so-called Department of Government Efficiency aimed at dramatically reducing the size of the federal workforce, said government spending could be reduced by $1 trillion or more.

"Maybe the economy could grow at 4 or 5% potentially, in terms of real useful goods and services output, and government spending can be reduced by about 3 or 4% of the economy, about maybe a trillion dollars or more, and the net effect of that would be no inflation from 2025 to 2026 so that would be quite remarkable," Musk said.

UAE AI Minister Omar Al Olama, who was interviewing Musk at the conference, said they would partner on "Dubai Loop", an underground high-speed transport system that Musk likened to a wormhole. Al Olama did not give details.

Turning to international affairs, Musk told the Middle East audience the United States has been "pushy" in the past and it should "mind its own business".

"I think we should, in general leave other countries to their own business," he said.

Trump has enraged the Arab world by saying the U.S. would take over the Gaza strip, resettle its Palestinian inhabitants and turn it into the "Riviera of the Middle East".

(Reporting by Yousef Saba; writing by Maha El Dahan; Editing by Himani Sarkar and Sonali Paul)