Musk's xAI to launch its Grok 3.5 model very soon
What's the story
Elon Musk has teased the imminent launch of xAI's Grok 3.5 AI model, hours after Alibaba unveiled its new Qwen3 models.
The launch of the third generation of Alibaba's Qwen family has sparked a lot of interest among developers, further heating the US-China AI race.
Alibaba's largest model in the new lineup features a whopping 235 billion parameters and allegedly beat DeepSeek-R1 and OpenAI's o1 reasoning models.
Availability
Grok 3.5 to be released for SuperGrok subscribers
Musk's start-up xAI will release an early beta version of Grok 3.5 to SuperGrok subscribers, who get premium access to the Grok chatbot.
Musk touted it as "the first AI that can, for example, accurately answer technical questions about rocket engines or electrochemistry."
The announcement came shortly after Alibaba made Qwen3 available on open-source AI development platform Hugging Face.
The most efficient version of Alibaba's new model could run on a smartphone due to its 600 million parameters.
Competition
AI race heats up with new model releases
The introduction of the DeepSeek-R1 model in January marked a new phase in the AI race, triggering an accelerated release schedule of new models, many of which are energy-efficient.
The cost-effective and high-performing DeepSeek models have been viewed as a wake-up call for US developers.
Apart from Alibaba, other tech giants such as Baidu, ByteDance, and Tencent Holdings have updated their foundational models in the last three months.
Reality
China's AI models gain popularity among developers
A Stanford University report recently revealed that China has quickly closed the gap with the US in producing cutting-edge AI models.
China's open-source models have also become popular among developers and users.
Alibaba's Qwen is now the world's biggest open-source AI ecosystem, with over 100,000 derivative models.
This is more than those based on Meta's Llama, underscoring China's remarkable progress in artificial intelligence.