So far, 2025 hasn’t exactly been a year of resounding success for centibillionaire\u00a0Elon Musk’s AI efforts.<\/p>\n
The richest man on earth has struggled to get xAI’s Grok off the ground, with setbacks taking the form of privacy scandals<\/a>, misinformation controversies<\/a>, not to mention a highly-public white supremacy episode<\/a>.<\/p>\n And now, more than a month after Musk promised to roll Grok out<\/a> to Teslas “next week,” it turns out a Chinese AI model will be taking the chatbot’s place.<\/p>\n According to\u00a0Bloomberg<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n Essentially, the voice-controlled software will let drivers utilize amenities like navigation apps and climate control hands-free. Bytedance’s Doubao<\/a>, the company’s flagship large language model (LLM) chatbot, will process user voice commands, while DeepSeek will handle “AI interaction,”\u00a0Bloomberg reported.<\/p>\n It’s not clear why Grok wasn’t chosen for this honor, given the staggering amount of money<\/a> Musk is pouring into xAI. The foul-mouthed chatbot began trickling out to US-based Teslas in the last month, with mixed results<\/a>.<\/p>\n Bloomberg, though, speculates that the western company could have hit some legal hurdles involved with integrating American tech into Chinese cars.<\/p>\n Other theories abound, like that Chinese consumers simply have no interest in Grok, despite its\u00a0availability, unlike other US AI models \u2014 at least not compared to DeepSeek, which has become a symbol of national pride<\/a> for the People’s Republic since its open-source V3 model shocked the world<\/a> earlier this year.<\/p>\n Known as the “low-cost equivalent” to heftier AI models developed in the US, DeepSeek recently released its impressive V3.1 model<\/a>, which is said to score only slightly lower than Grok 4 on intelligence tests<\/a>,\u00a0and at one twelfth the cost.<\/p>\n There’s also the question of perception, with Musk’s empire in China rapidly crumbling<\/a> over the past year;\u00a0even the US government-funded Voice of America reported<\/a> earlier this year that Chinese netizens were “not impressed” with previous versions of Grok.<\/p>\n DeepSeek, meanwhile, has inked deals<\/a> with two dozen Chinese automakers, including the Tesla-killer BYD<\/a>, to install its software in new vehicles.<\/p>\n “While many recognize DeepSeek\u2019s achievements, this represents just the beginning of China\u2019s AI innovation wave,” Louis Liang, an AI investor told\u00a0Bloomberg<\/a> of the previous deals. “We are witnessing the advent of AI mass adoption \u2014 this goes beyond national competition.”<\/p>\n