Today over at X (formerly Twitter), Elon Musk confirmed xAI's Grok is getting a new update. The Grok 3.5 release is still in beta and won't be available to the general public. However, SuperGrok subscribers will be getting an early peak at the new system starting next week. The exact release date for the beta has yet to be confirmed.
This release comes on the heels of speculation that Musk is planning to raise tens of billions to build an AI supercomputer comprised of one million GPUs. There have also been allegations that xAI has been powering their current Colossus supercomputer facility by means of illegal generators.
One of the leading features highlighted by the announcement is Grok 3.5's ability to provide unique answers to technical questions. More specifically, Musk highlights support for complex topics like electrochemistry and rocket engines with a notable degree of accuracy. While other AI systems can provide answers to technical questions, Grok 3.5 is doing so using a different approach.
Many AI platforms will scrape the internet for data and pull answers together using information provided by external sources. In this case, however, Grok 3.5 is creating answers from scratch using a "reasoning" model. This means that the answers it provides are potentially unique and not taken from existing copy on the internet.
This approach seems similar to DeepSeek R1, which also implements a type of reasoning model. This enables a more dynamic experience that isn't reliant on potentially plagiarized content, as well as being more capable in terms of answering complex questions. However, this type of technology comes at a cost, requiring much more computing power. That's likely why xAI is looking for more ways to expand its processing potential.
We expect to hear more details on the performance of Grok 3.5 in the coming weeks. It's important to note again that this is a beta release so there may be variance in the output of the official release. Until then, we can only speculate on the outcome.
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