Elon Musk has revealed plans to include Tesla Bots, powered by the new Grok AI model from xAI, on SpaceX's next Mars mission, expected to launch by the end of 2026. During a livestream on February 18, Musk shared details about the upcoming mission, emphasizing that SpaceX aims to send Starship rockets to Mars, with Optimus robots and Grok onboard, if everything goes as planned.

SpaceX’s Mars exploration timeline aligns with the Earth-Mars transit window, which opens every 26 months. Musk indicated that the next ideal launch window will occur in November 2026. This window is critical for a successful Mars mission, making it the target timeframe for SpaceX’s next major step toward interplanetary travel.

In addition to the Mars mission, Musk highlighted the success of Grok 3, the latest AI model from xAI. Grok 3 has already surpassed competitors like Google, OpenAI, and DeepSeek in recent blind evaluations conducted by Chatbot Arena, an open-source AI benchmarking platform. The large language model (LLM) was tested by users who anonymously interacted with different AI chatbots and rated their responses. Grok 3 received a score of 1400, a record achievement that continues to climb, according to Musk.

Furthermore, the latest Grok model has excelled in multiple categories, including overall performance, coding, math, creative writing, and instruction following. In a recent development, Grok 3 was noted to top all categories in benchmark tests, proving its superiority over other models in areas such as style control and longer queries.

In a related incident, an engineer from xAI resigned on February 12 after a controversial post on X, where he ranked Grok 3 lower than ChatGPT. Despite pressure to delete the post, the engineer chose not to retract his opinion, stating he was willing to face the consequences.