In a rare admission, SpaceX chief Elon Musk has said that its rival Google will win the AI race. However, Musk’s admission comes with a caveat. The richest man on Earth notes that the tech giant will win the AI race in the US, while China will win the AI race on Earth and his own company will win it in space.
Musk was replying to a post by Bindy Reddy, CEO of Abacus AI and a former Google employee. Reddy had expressed frustration about the Gemini 3.0 model, which didn’t quite meet her expectations, making her rely on the Gemini 2.5 model instead. She also urged the Sundar Pichai-led tech giant to run massive parallel experiments on training AI models to catch up in the AI race.
“Gemini 3.0 didn’t quite work out and most of us are still stuck with 2.5. Sometimes I don’t get it – what’s preventing Google from ditching all the side hustles and training 100 models from 100 teams in parallel,” Reddy wrote in her post.
In reply, Musk noted, “Google will win the AI race in the West, China on Earth, and SpaceX in space.”
Elon Musk’s xAI reshuffles:
Notably, Musk had also recently admitted that xAI, maker of Grok AI, is lagging behind its rivals and noted that the company would catch up to its competitors by the end of this year.
“xAI will catch up this year and then exceed them all by such a long distance in three years that you will need the James Webb telescope to see who is in second place,” Musk claimed.
Musk had also stated that he was looking to rebuild xAI from the ground up, while noting that it “was not built right the first time around.”
xAI also saw a number of its co-founders leaving the company, which left only 2 of the 11 co-founders now associated with the AI startup.
A report by Financial Times had also noted that the billionaire had ordered a round of sweeping layoffs at the AI startup after being frustrated with the lack of progress on its AI coding platform akin to OpenAI’s Codex or Anthropic’s Claude Code.
Meanwhile, the billionaire had earlier merged xAI with his social media platform X. Earlier this year, he also announced that SpaceX is acquiring xAI with a mission to build orbital data centres in space.
“In the long term, space-based AI is obviously the only way to scale. To harness even a millionth of our Sun’s energy would require over a million times more energy than our civilization currently uses!” Musk had said in a blog post then.
