Elon Musk's Mars Mission: Optimus Robots and Grok AI Aboard

SpaceX's next Mars rocket could include Optimus robots and Grok, according to Elon Musk. The tech billionaire plans to send a Tesla Bot, powered by xAI's artificial intelligence model Grok, on SpaceX's next Mars mission by the end of 2026. Musk announced xAI's latest AI model release, Grok 3, in a livestream on X on Feb. 18. During the discussion, he revealed that most of SpaceX's projects for Mars exploration are slated for around Q4 2026.

Musk explained that the Earth-Mars transit window occurs every 26 months, making November 2026 the next ideal opportunity for rocket launches to the Red Planet. He also mentioned that he may be sending a Tesla Bot and Grok on the Mars mission, stating, "If all goes well, SpaceX will send Starship rockets to Mars with Optimus robots and Grok."

Grok 3, developed by xAI, has recently outperformed rival AI systems from Google, OpenAI, and DeepSeek in a blind evaluation conducted by Chatbot Arena, an open-source AI benchmarking platform. The large language model (LLM) blind test allowed users to ask questions to two anonymous AI chatbots and rank them based on their responses. The tests have collectively recorded over a million community votes.

Musk and the xAI team claimed that the early Grok 3 model, codenamed chocolate, achieved a record milestone of 1400 score. "And it's still climbing. So we have to keep updating it. It's 1400 and climbing," Musk said. LMArena also noted that the early Grok 3 model currently ranks first in all categories, including overall with style control, hard prompts, and hard prompts with style control, coding, math, creative writing, instruction following, longer query, and multi-turn.

On Feb. 12, an xAI engineer quit over an X post in which he had ranked Grok 3 lower than ChatGPT, sharing his personal opinion prior to the model's release. Benjamin DeKraker, the engineer, wrote, "I either had to delete the post quoted below or face being fired. After reviewing everything and thinking a lot, I've decided that I'm not going to delete the post -- which is very clearly a harmless