It's another week to unravel the beautiful world of artificial intelligence. I want to remain a consistent student as I try to maximize this new tech to my advantage. I stumbled on a post on X made by Elon Musk, and it tells of Grok 3.5 Beta.
Elon Musk, the visionary entrepreneur behind Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI, revealed on Tuesday, April 29, 2025, that the early beta release of Grok 3.5, the latest iteration of xAI’s artificial intelligence model, will launch exclusively for SuperGrok subscribers next week. Musk shared this update via X, stating, “It is the first AI that can, for example, accurately answer technical questions about rocket engines or electrochemistry. Grok is reasoning from first principles and coming up with answers that simply don’t exist on the Internet.” Here is link to the post.
This announcement comes on the heels of the remarkable success of Grok 3, which has already transformed the artificial intelligence industry with its unprecedented user growth and innovative capabilities. According to a post by Mario Nawfal on April 29, 2025, citing TechCrunch, Grok 3’s launch triggered a 10X spike in mobile app downloads the week it debuted, with daily U.S. users soaring by 260%. Globally, the app achieved 4.5 million daily hits, a surge partly attributed to its expansion into new markets such as Europe, Latin America, and Southeast Asia, announced by xAI on March 15, 2025. Additionally, U.S. daily visits to the Grok web app (Grok.com) skyrocketed from 189,000 to over 900,000 in the days following Grok 3’s release.
The Grok-AI Assistant app for Android, released on March 18, 2025, has been a key driver of this growth. Version 0.4.12, last updated on April 27, 2025, has already surpassed 10 million downloads, proof of its popularity. Compatible with Android 9 and up, the app offers users access to Grok’s advanced features, including its ability to answer questions with less censorship than competitors like ChatGPT, as noted in a March 10, 2025, update on grokaimodel.com. The app’s rollout in regions where Android dominates, such as Southeast Asia and Latin America, has significantly contributed to Grok’s global reach.
Anticipating Grok 3.5 with Improved Reasoning
Musk’s announcement of Grok 3.5 shows xAI’s commitment to pushing the boundaries of AI technology. Unlike traditional AI models that scrape the internet for answers, Grok 3.5 is designed to reason from first principles, deriving solutions by breaking down complex problems into fundamental truths. This capability allows it to address highly technical queries in fields like rocket engines and electrochemistry, areas critical to Musk’s ventures, such as SpaceX. A report by Tom’s Hardware on April 29, 2025, highlighted that this reasoning model enables Grok 3.5 to provide unique answers not found online, a feature that sets it apart from competitors like DeepSeek R1, which also employs a reasoning model but lacks Grok’s focus on niche technical domains.
Grok 3.5 builds on the foundation laid by Grok 3, which demonstrated exceptional performance in benchmarks like the 2025 American Invitational Mathematics Examination (AIME), where it scored 93.3% using a consensus@64 technique, according to an xAI blog post from February 19, 2025. Grok 3’s training utilized xAI’s Memphis data center, equipped with 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs, enabling its superior performance across various domains. Grok 3.5 is expected to leverage even greater computational resources, ensuring rapid and accurate responses to intricate technical questions.
Grok 3.5’s focus on technical domains like rocket engines could directly benefit SpaceX, where innovative problem-solving is critical. The New York Times reported on March 23, 2025, that SpaceX has seen a surge in federal contracts with NASA and the Pentagon, particularly for the development of the Starship system for NASA’s Artemis program. Since March 2025, SpaceX has reportedly integrated Grok 3 for engineering simulations, a move that could be amplified with Grok 3.5’s advanced reasoning capabilities. A user (@vittorio) asked on April 29, 2025, if Grok had solved problems for SpaceX, to which Grok responded that while no public confirmation exists, its capabilities suggest potential use, a hint at the AI’s growing role in Musk’s ecosystem.
So far, Grok has been “heavily” used within the U.S. federal government, assisting with tasks like regulatory analysis, highlighting its versatility beyond commercial applications. Musk’s focus on AI development also shows his long-standing concerns about AI risks.
The exclusive beta release of Grok 3.5 for SuperGrok subscribers, priced at $30 per month, follows xAI’s strategy of tiered access, with Grok 3 initially limited to X Premium+ users before broader rollouts. The anticipation for Grok 3.5 is high, with users and industry experts eager to see how its advanced reasoning capabilities will further disrupt the AI sector.
With over 10 million Android downloads and counting, the Grok-AI Assistant app has already made a significant mark. As Grok 3.5 rolls out, it promises to redefine what AI can achieve, offering answers to questions once unanswerable, and this will change the course of industries like space exploration and beyond.