Elon Musk’s AI firm, xAI, launched its newest flagship AI mannequin, Grok 3, late Monday night time, together with new capabilities within the Grok apps for iOS and the net.
Grok, xAI’s reply to fashions like OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Google’s Gemini, can analyze photographs and reply to questions, and powers plenty 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 unlimited knowledge middle in Memphis — a knowledge middle containing round 200,000 GPUs — to coach Grok 3. In a submit on X, Musk claimed that Grok 3 was developed with “10x” extra computing than Grok 2, its predecessor, and with an expanded coaching knowledge set that ostensibly consists of filings from courtroom circumstances.
“Grok 3 is an order of magnitude more capable than Grok 2,” Musk mentioned throughout a live-streamed presentation Monday. “[It’s a] maximally truth-seeking AI, even if that truth is sometimes at odds with what is politically correct.”
Grok 3 is a household of fashions, to be exact — not only one. A smaller model of Grok 3, Grok 3 mini, responds to questions extra rapidly at the price of some accuracy. Not all fashions and associated options can be found as of but (and a few are in beta), however the rollout begins on Monday.
xAI claims that Grok 3 beats GPT-4o on benchmarks together with AIME, which evaluates a mannequin’s efficiency on a sampling of math questions, and GPQA, which assesses fashions utilizing PhD-level physics, biology, and chemistry issues. An early model of Grok 3 additionally scored competitively in Chatbot Area, a crowdsourced take a look at that pits totally different AI fashions in opposition to one another and has customers vote on their most popular responses, based on xAI.
Two variations of Grok 3, Grok 3 Reasoning and Grok 3 mini Reasoning, can fastidiously “think through” issues, just like “reasoning” fashions like OpenAI’s o3-mini and Chinese language AI firm DeepSeek’s R1. Reasoning fashions completely fact-check themselves earlier than giving out outcomes, which helps them keep away from a number of the pitfalls that usually journey up fashions.
xAI claims that Grok 3 Reasoning surpasses the most effective model of o3-mini — o3-mini-high — on a number of widespread benchmarks, together with a more moderen arithmetic benchmark referred to as AIME 2025.
The reasoning fashions might be accessed by way of the Grok app. Customers can ask Grok 3 to “Think,” or — for harder queries — leverage “Big Brain” mode for reasoning that employs extra computing. xAI describes the reasoning fashions as finest suited to mathematics-, science-, and programming-related questions.
Musk mentioned that, within the Grok app, a number of the reasoning fashions’ “thoughts” are obscured to forestall distillation, a technique utilized by AI mannequin builders to extract data from one other mannequin. Not too long ago, 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 “deep research” 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 thirty days) will get Grok 3 first, and different options are gated behind a brand new plan that xAI’s calling SuperGrok. Priced at $30 per thirty 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 can give Grok fashions a synthesized voice. A couple of weeks after that, Grok 3 fashions will arrive in xAI’s enterprise API, together with the DeepSearch functionality.
xAI plans to open-source Grok 2 within the coming months, mentioned Musk.
“Our general approach is that we will open-source the last version [of Grok] when the next version is fully out,” he continued. “When Grok 3 is mature and stable, which is probably within a few months, then we’ll open-source Grok 2.”
When Musk introduced Grok roughly two years in the past, he pitched the AI as edgy, unfiltered, and anti-“woke” — generally, prepared to reply controversial questions different AI programs gained’t. He delivered on a few of that promise. Informed to be vulgar, for instance, Grok and Grok 2 would fortunately oblige, spewing colourful language you seemingly wouldn’t hear from ChatGPT.
However Grok fashions previous to Grok 3 hedged on political topics and wouldn’t cross sure boundaries. In truth, one examine discovered that Grok leaned to the political left on subjects like transgender rights, variety packages, and inequality.
Musk has blamed the conduct on Grok’s coaching knowledge — public internet pages — and pledged to “shift Grok closer to politically neutral.” It’s not but clear whether or not xAI achieved that purpose — and what the implications is perhaps.
