Elon Musk’s AI firm, xAI, late on Monday launched its newest flagship AI mannequin, Grok 3, and unveiled new capabilities for the Grok iOS and net apps.
Grok, xAI’s reply to fashions like OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Google’s Gemini, can analyze photographs and reply to questions, and powers quite a lot of options on Musk’s social community, X. Grok 3, which has been in growth for a number of months, was optimistically slated for launch in 2024, however missed that deadline.
Monday’s is an bold launch.
xAI has been utilizing an infinite information heart in Memphis containing round 200,000 GPUs to coach Grok 3. In a publish on X, Musk claimed that Grok 3 was developed with “10x” extra computing energy than its predecessor, Grok 2, utilizing an expanded coaching information set that ostensibly consists of filings from courtroom circumstances.
“Grok 3 is an order of magnitude extra succesful than Grok 2,” Musk mentioned throughout a live-streamed presentation on Monday. “[It’s a] maximally truth-seeking AI, even when that fact is typically at odds with what’s politically right.”
Grok 3 is a household of fashions, to be exact. A smaller model of Grok 3, Grok 3 mini, responds to questions extra rapidly at the price of some accuracy. Not all of the fashions and associated options of Grok 3 can be found but (some are in beta), however they started rolling out on Monday.
xAI claims Grok 3 beats GPT-4o on benchmarks that embrace AIME (evaluates a mannequin’s efficiency on a sampling of math questions) and GPQA (assesses fashions utilizing PhD-level physics, biology, and chemistry issues). An early model of Grok 3 additionally scored competitively in Chatbot Enviornment, a crowdsourced take a look at that pits totally different AI fashions in opposition to one another and has customers vote on their most well-liked responses, in response to xAI.
Two variations of the brand new mannequin, Grok 3 Reasoning and Grok 3 mini Reasoning, can rigorously “suppose via” issues, much like “reasoning” fashions like OpenAI’s o3-mini and Chinese language AI firm DeepSeek’s R1. Reasoning fashions attempt to fact-check themselves earlier than giving out outcomes, which helps them keep away from a few of the pitfalls that usually journey up fashions.
xAI claims that Grok 3 Reasoning surpasses one of the best model of o3-mini — o3-mini-high — on a number of fashionable benchmarks, together with a more moderen arithmetic benchmark referred to as AIME 2025.
These reasoning fashions will be accessed by way of the Grok app. Customers can ask Grok 3 to “Assume,” or — for harder queries — leverage “Large Mind” mode for reasoning that employs extra computing. xAI describes the reasoning fashions as finest fitted to arithmetic, science, and programming questions.
Musk mentioned a few of the reasoning fashions’ “ideas” are obscured within the Grok app to stop distillation, a technique utilized by AI mannequin builders to extract data from different fashions. Lately, DeepSeek was accused of distilling OpenAI’s fashions to create its personal.
Grok’s reasoning fashions underpin a brand new function within the Grok app referred to as DeepSearch, xAI’s reply to AI-powered analysis instruments like OpenAI’s deep analysis. DeepSearch scans the web and X to investigate info and ship an summary in response to a query.
Subscribers to X’s Premium+ tier ($22 per 30 days) will get entry to Grok 3 first, and different options will likely be gated behind a brand new plan that xAI’s calling SuperGrok. Priced at $30 per 30 days or $300 per 12 months (if leaks are to be believed), SuperGrok unlocks extra reasoning and DeepSearch queries, and throws in limitless picture era.
Sooner or later — as quickly as a couple of week from now — the Grok app will achieve a “voice mode,” Musk mentioned, which is able to give Grok fashions a synthesized voice. A number of weeks after that, Grok 3 fashions will likely be obtainable by way of xAI’s enterprise API, together with the DeepSearch functionality.
xAI plans to open-source Grok 2 within the coming months, Musk mentioned.
“Our common strategy is that we are going to open-source the final model [of Grok] when the subsequent model is totally out,” he continued. “When Grok 3 is mature and steady, which might be inside just a few months, then we’ll open-source Grok 2.”
When Musk introduced Grok roughly two years in the past, he pitched the AI mannequin as edgy, unfiltered and anti-“woke” — usually, keen to reply controversial questions different AI methods received’t. He delivered on a few of that promise. Advised to be vulgar, for instance, Grok and Grok 2 would fortunately oblige, spewing colourful language you doubtless wouldn’t hear from ChatGPT.
However Grok fashions previous to Grok 3 hedged on political topics and wouldn’t cross sure boundaries. Actually, one research discovered that Grok leaned to the political left on subjects like transgender rights, range packages, and inequality.
Musk has blamed the habits on Grok’s coaching information — public net pages — and pledged to “shift Grok nearer to politically impartial.” It’s not but clear whether or not xAI has achieved that purpose, and what the results could be.
