Musk Says Chatbot Grok 3 Will Be Unveiled Monday

 A 3D-printed miniature model of Elon Musk and xAI logo are seen in this illustration taken, February 16, 2025. (Reuters)
A 3D-printed miniature model of Elon Musk and xAI logo are seen in this illustration taken, February 16, 2025. (Reuters)
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Musk Says Chatbot Grok 3 Will Be Unveiled Monday

 A 3D-printed miniature model of Elon Musk and xAI logo are seen in this illustration taken, February 16, 2025. (Reuters)
A 3D-printed miniature model of Elon Musk and xAI logo are seen in this illustration taken, February 16, 2025. (Reuters)

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 8:00 pm Pacific time (0400 GMT), the tech billionaire wrote 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 advisor 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 civilization, 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, 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.



Google to Invest $6 billion in Southern India Data Center, Sources Say

The Google logo is seen outside the company's offices in London, Britain, June 24, 2025. (Reuters)
The Google logo is seen outside the company's offices in London, Britain, June 24, 2025. (Reuters)
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Google to Invest $6 billion in Southern India Data Center, Sources Say

The Google logo is seen outside the company's offices in London, Britain, June 24, 2025. (Reuters)
The Google logo is seen outside the company's offices in London, Britain, June 24, 2025. (Reuters)

Google will invest $6 billion to develop a 1-gigawatt data centre and its power infrastructure in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh in the Alphabet unit's first such investment in India, government sources said on Wednesday.

Due to be built in the port city of Visakhapatnam, the data centre investment includes $2 billion in renewable energy capacity that will be used to power the facility, two Andhra Pradesh government sources with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters.

The search giant's data centre will be the largest in capacity and investment size in Asia and is part a multi-billion-dollar expansion of its data centre portfolio across the region in countries including Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand, Reuters reported.

In April, Alphabet said it was still committed to spending some $75 billion this year to build data centre capacity despite the economic uncertainty resulting from US President Donald Trump's global tariff offensive.

Alphabet did not immediately respond to Reuters' request for comment.

Andhra Pradesh's information technology minister Nara Lokesh, who is in Singapore to discuss investments with thegovernment and business leaders there, did not comment on the Google investment.

"We've made certain announcements like Sify, which are public," he said, referring to a 550-MW data centre Sify Technologies plans to build in the state. "There are certain announcements which are not yet public. In October, we will make those announcements."

STATE'S POST-SPLIT INVESTMENT DRIVE

Andhra Pradesh, a state run by a leading ally of India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi, was split into two in 2014, losing its former capital Hyderabad and a major revenue source to the newly created Telangana state.

Andhra Pradesh has since been looking to attract investments to ease the financial strains of high debt and social spending.

Lokesh said Andhra Pradesh has already been able to finalise investments in data centres with total capacity of 1.6 GW, adding that it aims to build 6 GW of data centres over the next five years from nearly zero currently.

He expects the initial 1.6 GW of already agreed data centres to be operational in the next 24 months. That would be more than the 1.4 GW currently in operation in the entire country, according to real estate consultancy Anarock.

"We're also working on getting three cable landing stations in Visakhapatnam. We want to create enough of cable network, which will be two times what Mumbai has today," Lokesh said.

Cable landing stations - typically located close to data centres requiring fast and reliable connections to global networks - are used to store equipment which receives and relays data from undersea cables.

Lokesh also said the state was looking to build up energy infrastructure to meet sustainability requirements of data centres. He said he anticipated power generation capacity requirements of as much as 10 GW from the electricity-intensive industry over the next five years.

"Majority will end up being actually green energy, and that's the unique value proposition that we bring to the table," he said.

Some of the additional capacity will be coal-fired, however, as data centres require reliable, high volume power throughout the day, he added.