So far, 2025 hasn’t exactly been a year of resounding success for centibillionaire Elon Musk’s AI efforts.
The richest man on earth has struggled to get xAI’s Grok off the ground, with setbacks taking the form of privacy scandals, misinformation controversies, not to mention a highly-public white supremacy episode.
And now, more than a month after Musk promised to roll Grok out to Teslas “next week,” it turns out a Chinese AI model will be taking the chatbot’s place.
According to Bloomberg, Tesla’s Chinese division is planning to introduce in-car voice assistance via DeepSeek and Bytedance’s AI models at some point in the near future.
Essentially, the voice-controlled software will let drivers utilize amenities like navigation apps and climate control hands-free. Bytedance’s Doubao, the company’s flagship large language model (LLM) chatbot, will process user voice commands, while DeepSeek will handle “AI interaction,” Bloomberg reported.
It’s not clear why Grok wasn’t chosen for this honor, given the staggering amount of money Musk is pouring into xAI. The foul-mouthed chatbot began trickling out to US-based Teslas in the last month, with mixed results.
Bloomberg, though, speculates that the western company could have hit some legal hurdles involved with integrating American tech into Chinese cars.
Other theories abound, like that Chinese consumers simply have no interest in Grok, despite its availability, unlike other US AI models — at least not compared to DeepSeek, which has become a symbol of national pride for the People’s Republic since its open-source V3 model shocked the world earlier this year.
Known as the “low-cost equivalent” to heftier AI models developed in the US, DeepSeek recently released its impressive V3.1 model, which is said to score only slightly lower than Grok 4 on intelligence tests, and at one twelfth the cost.
There’s also the question of perception, with Musk’s empire in China rapidly crumbling over the past year; even the US government-funded Voice of America reported earlier this year that Chinese netizens were “not impressed” with previous versions of Grok.
DeepSeek, meanwhile, has inked deals with two dozen Chinese automakers, including the Tesla-killer BYD, to install its software in new vehicles.
“While many recognize DeepSeek’s achievements, this represents just the beginning of China’s AI innovation wave,” Louis Liang, an AI investor told Bloomberg of the previous deals. “We are witnessing the advent of AI mass adoption — this goes beyond national competition.”
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