Elon Musk praised his upcoming Grok 3 chatbot as an AI model outperforming everything else that’s been released thus far, and said the world would get to see it in a matter of weeks.

“At times I think Grok 3 is scary smart,” Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur and now close adviser to US President Donald Trump, said via video conference at the World Government Summit in Dubai on Thursday.

The wide-ranging conversation spanned Musk’s own work on AI, his simmering feud with former partner Sam Altman at OpenAI, plans to “delete entire agencies” of the US federal government and futuristic musings on the state of AI. At one point Musk joked that he hoped AI years down the road would be kind to humanity.

Musk said the upcoming model from his own company, xAI, was trained on synthetic data and is capable of reflecting on mistakes that it makes by going back and forth through the data in a bid to achieve logical consistency.

“We’re really in the final stages of polishing Grok 3 and probably it gets released in about a week or two, so pretty soon,” he said, adding he doesn’t want to be “hasty” in the release of the model.

Musk was interviewed by Omar Al Olama, the UAE’s minister for AI and the digital economy.

The oil-rich country is making major investments to become a regional heavyweight in AI and has cut ties with China in the sector to assuage Washington’s worries. UAE President Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed met with Trump during his trip to the US last year, where he prioritised conversations around AI.

Musk vs Altman

Musk also took aim at competitor OpenAI, a firm for which he is assembling an unsolicited US$97.4-billion bid.

“OpenAI is meant to be open source, non-profit and now they changed the name to closed for maximum profit AI,” the world’s richest person told the audience. “They’re after money next level.”

Musk and Altman — who together co-founded OpenAI as a non-profit in 2015 — have been locked in a longstanding feud over the company’s direction. Altman, who is pushing to restructure the company into a for-profit business, has rejected Musk’s offer, calling it a tactic to “slow us down”.

Musk appeared on screen in front of an audience of suited government and business leaders wearing a black t-shirt with the words “tech support” in all capital letters. Musk joked that his main job title now is technical support for the White House.

Musk is head of Trump’s so-called department of government efficiency, where he has spearheaded the president’s effort to modernise federal technology and identify spending cuts. Musk has taken credit for billions of dollars in cancelled programmes and contracts, and pushed a voluntary resignation programme for federal workers that, while falling short of its lofty targets, persuaded roughly 3% of the government’s civilian workforce to quit.