Tech billionaire Elon Musk has announced a sweeping new direction for his artificial intelligence AI chatbot Grok, revealing plans to retrain the system using what he calls a cleaner and more accurate version of human knowledge.

The initiative, led by his AI company xAI, is part of Musk’s broader ambition to rival leading AI platforms such as ChatGPT, which he has consistently criticized for ideological bias.

In a series of posts shared on social media platform X, Musk said the forthcoming version of the chatbot, tentatively named Grok 3.5 or potentially Grok 4, will possess “advanced reasoning” and will be tasked with revising the global knowledge base. “We will use Grok 3.5 (maybe we should call it 4), which has advanced reasoning, to rewrite the entire corpus of human knowledge, adding missing information and deleting errors,” he wrote.

The entrepreneur, who has long voiced concerns about what he terms an ideological “mind virus” infecting current AI systems, described the move as a step towards creating a less constrained, more objective artificial intelligence. He encouraged users to contribute so-called “divisive facts”, statements that are politically incorrect but, in his view, grounded in truth, for inclusion in Grok’s training data.

AI chatbot Grok significance

In other news, xAI also struck a significant partnership deal with messaging giant Telegram last month. As part of the agreement, xAI will invest $300 million to integrate Grok into the Telegram ecosystem over the next year. The arrangement, which includes both cash and equity components, also features a revenue-sharing model whereby Telegram will receive 50 per cent of all subscription revenues generated via Grok on its platform.

Telegram founder Pavel Durov confirmed the collaboration on X, stating that the integration is designed to expand Grok’s reach to the messaging app’s vast user base, currently estimated at over one billion globally. Durov also sought to address potential privacy concerns, assuring users that Grok would only have access to content that is explicitly shared with it during interactions.