Elon Musk announced on Friday that the next version of his AI chatbot, Grok 5, will be far smarter than any other AI out there. He made the statement during Baron Capital’s annual investment conference.
“Grok 5, I think, will be the smartest AI in the world by a big margin in every way,”
Elon Musk
Earlier, in August, Musk had planned to release the “crushingly good” next version of Grok by the end of 2025. On Friday, he updated the timeline, saying it will now launch within the first three months of next year, 2026. Grok 5 will have twice as many parameters as the current model. These parameters help the AI understand and respond better.
Could Grok 5 really think like a human?
Musk said the new model will be very smart and fast. He also thinks there is about a 10% chance it could reach human-level intelligence. The team at xAI has been training Grok to use tools better, like searching the internet and understanding live videos.
“I’ve never thought this before,” Musk said about the possibility of Grok achieving what experts call artificial general intelligence. “It’s really going to feel sentient.”
Where is Grok already being used?
Grok isn’t brand new. It’s already part of Musk’s companies:
- SpaceX uses it for customer support in its satellite internet service.
Musk also wants Grok inside Tesla’s humanoid robots. - X (formerly Twitter) uses Grok for social media tasks.
- Tesla cars have it integrated for smart features.
Musk said building AI quickly requires hiring the right people and installing a lot of hardware. This can be very expensive.
xAI’s Colossus data center in Memphis, Tennessee, already has at least 200,000 graphics processing units (GPUs). The company plans to eventually install 1 million GPUs. The startup spends about $1 billion each month on AI development, Bloomberg reported in June.
Other tech giants are spending heavily on AI too. Meta plans to spend up to $72 billion this year, mostly on AI infrastructure. In 2026, it will continue big spending while also paying employees. Earlier this year, Meta offered pay packages of up to $300 million to hire top AI researchers from OpenAI. In June, it invested $14 billion in startup Scale AI and hired its CEO to lead its Superintelligence Labs. Last month, Meta cut around 600 jobs in its AI team.
Alphabet expects to spend $91to $93 billion in 2025, while Amazon plans $125 billion and aims to aggressively build data centers. Microsoft, which works with OpenAI, had $34.9 billion in capital spending in its first fiscal quarter, $10 billion more than expected.
