Elon Musk's AI company xAI is preparing to launch Grok 3.5, a significant upgrade to its flagship AI chatbot that promises to revolutionize how AI systems approach complex technical problems.
The early beta release, scheduled for the week of May 5-9, will initially be available exclusively to SuperGrok subscribers. According to Musk's April 29 announcement on X, Grok 3.5 represents a fundamental shift in AI reasoning capabilities, being "the first AI that can accurately answer technical questions about rocket engines or electrochemistry" by reasoning from first principles rather than retrieving information from the internet.
This release builds upon Grok 3, which debuted on February 17, 2025, after being trained on xAI's massive Colossus supercomputer cluster containing approximately 200,000 NVIDIA GPUs. Grok 3 already demonstrated superior performance on several benchmarks, including scoring 93.3% accuracy on the American Invitational Mathematics Examination (AIME) 2025, significantly outperforming competitors like OpenAI's o3-mini-high.
Grok 3's standout features include its "Think" mode for step-by-step reasoning, "Big Brain" mode for tackling more complex problems, and "DeepSearch" for comprehensive internet research. The model also boasts a massive 1 million token context window, allowing it to process extensive documents while maintaining accuracy.
The upcoming Grok 3.5 takes these capabilities further by focusing on "first principles" reasoning—deriving answers from fundamental laws rather than pattern matching. This approach aims to solve one of AI's persistent challenges: providing accurate responses to novel, highly technical questions outside its training data.
As competition in the AI space intensifies, xAI has rapidly expanded its infrastructure and capabilities. The company has doubled its GPU cluster since Grok 3's release and plans to open-source Grok 2 once Grok 3 reaches stability. With Grok 4 reportedly planned for late 2025, Musk's ambitious roadmap signals xAI's determination to challenge established players like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic in the increasingly competitive AI landscape.