Recently, Musk announced on the X social platform that Grok-2.5, the best model of xAI last year, was officially open source , and Grok-3 will also be open source within about 6 months.
Judging from the performance of Grok-2.5, its total parameters are as high as 905 billion. The 136 billion parameters are activated each time during inference, making it one of the most powerful open source models at present . It also supports context lengths up to 131,100 tokens, and is able to process long documents and conversation history at once. In addition, Grok-2.5 adopts a hybrid expert (MoE) architecture, which can greatly expand the model size while continuously increasing computing costs.
Musk made a bold statement on the X platform that xAI will soon be far ahead of any company outside Google and then far surpass Google. However, he also admitted that Chinese companies will be the strongest competitors, “because they have much more electricity than the United States and are extremely powerful in hardware construction.”
Previously, Musk said that China’s power generation is far greater than that of the United States, and it looks like a rocket entering orbit, while the United States’ power generation is stagnant.
It is understood that the power infrastructure in the United States is seriously aging , and many transmission lines and power generation equipment have been operating for many years, with high maintenance costs and inefficient efficiency. This leads to an increase in power transmission loss and it is difficult to improve power generation efficiency. The existing power grid is difficult to carry large-scale new power demand, especially with the rapid development of emerging industries such as data centers and electric vehicles , the load pressure on the power grid has further increased. Joe Bowring, president of Monitoring Analytics, an independent regulator of PJM power grid, even told the media: “There is no new power generation capacity to meet the new load needs.”
Musk’s statement that “China’s electricity is the greatest advantage” reveals the essential contradiction of the AI competition. Data from the US PJM power grid regulator shows that in 2025, the rate applied for by power companies due to the surge in data center demand reached US$29 billion, a year-on-year increase of 142%. China’s power generation has been ranked first in the world for more than 10 years. In 2022, the proportion of global total power generation will reach 30%, and in 2023, China’s power generation will reach 9.4 trillion kilowatt-hours, almost twice that of the United States (4.4 trillion kilowatt-hours in the United States) . This magnitude difference will be exponentially amplified in the AI era.
