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 photos and reply to questions, and powers a variety 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 knowledge middle 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 knowledge set that ostensibly consists of filings from courtroom instances.
“Grok 3 is an order of magnitude extra succesful than Grok 2,” Musk stated throughout a live-streamed presentation on Monday. “[It’s a] maximally truth-seeking AI, even when that fact is usually at odds with what’s politically appropriate.”
Grok 3 is a household of fashions, to be exact. A smaller model of Grok 3, Grok 3 mini, responds to questions extra shortly 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 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 check that pits totally different AI fashions towards one another and has customers vote on their most well-liked responses, in accordance with xAI.
Two fashions within the new Grok 3 household, Grok 3 Reasoning and Grok 3 mini Reasoning, can fastidiously “suppose by way of” issues, just 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 number of the pitfalls that usually journey up fashions.
xAI claims that Grok 3 Reasoning surpasses the very best model of o3-mini — o3-mini-high — on a number of fashionable benchmarks, together with a more recent arithmetic benchmark known as AIME 2025.
These reasoning fashions will be accessed by way of the Grok app. Customers can ask Grok 3 to “Suppose,” or — for tougher queries — leverage “Huge Mind” mode for reasoning that employs further computing. xAI describes the reasoning fashions as greatest suited to arithmetic, science, and programming questions.
Musk stated a number of the reasoning fashions’ “ideas” are obscured within the Grok app to stop distillation, a technique utilized by AI mannequin builders to extract information from different fashions. Not too long ago, DeepSeek was accused of distilling OpenAI’s fashions to create its personal.
Grok’s reasoning fashions underpin a brand new characteristic within the Grok app known as DeepSearch, xAI’s reply to AI-powered analysis instruments like OpenAI’s deep analysis. DeepSearch scans the web and X to investigate data and ship an summary in response to a query.
Subscribers to X’s Premium+ tier ($50 per 30 days) will get entry to Grok 3 first, and different options shall 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 further 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 stated, which is able to give Grok fashions a synthesized voice. A number of weeks after that, Grok 3 fashions shall be accessible by way of xAI’s enterprise API, together with the DeepSearch functionality.
xAI plans to open-source Grok 2 within the coming months, Musk stated.
“Our basic method is that we’ll open-source the final model [of Grok] when the following model is absolutely out,” he continued. “When Grok 3 is mature and steady, which might be inside a number of 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” — on the whole, keen to reply controversial questions different AI programs gained’t. He delivered on a few of that promise. Instructed to be vulgar, for instance, Grok and Grok 2 would fortunately oblige, spewing colourful language you possible wouldn’t hear from ChatGPT.
However Grok fashions previous to Grok 3 hedged on political topics and wouldn’t cross sure boundaries. The truth is, one research discovered that Grok leaned to the political left on matters like transgender rights, range applications, and inequality.
Musk has blamed the habits on Grok’s coaching knowledge — 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 implications is likely to be.
