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 a variety of options on Musk’s social community, X. Grok 3, which has been in improvement 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 put up 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 contains filings from court docket 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 reality is usually 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 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 Enviornment, a crowdsourced take a look at that pits completely different AI fashions in opposition to one another and has customers vote on their most popular responses, in accordance with xAI.
Two fashions within the new Grok 3 household, Grok 3 Reasoning and Grok 3 mini Reasoning, can fastidiously “assume by means 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 one of the best model of o3-mini — o3-mini-high — on a number of well-liked benchmarks, together with a more recent arithmetic benchmark referred to as AIME 2025.
These reasoning fashions could be accessed by way of the Grok app. Customers can ask Grok 3 to “Assume,” or — for harder queries — leverage “Huge Mind” mode for reasoning that employs further computing. xAI describes the reasoning fashions as finest suited to arithmetic, science, and programming questions.
Musk mentioned a number of the reasoning fashions’ “ideas” are obscured within the Grok app to forestall distillation, a technique utilized by AI mannequin builders to extract data 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 referred to as DeepSearch, xAI’s reply to AI-powered analysis instruments like OpenAI’s deep analysis. DeepSearch scans the web and X to research 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 can 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 few week from now — the Grok app will achieve a “voice mode,” Musk mentioned, which is able to give Grok fashions a synthesized voice. Just a few weeks after that, Grok 3 fashions can 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 method is that we’ll open-source the final model [of Grok] when the subsequent model is totally out,” he continued. “When Grok 3 is mature and secure, which might be inside a couple 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” — basically, keen to reply controversial questions different AI techniques received’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 probably wouldn’t hear from ChatGPT.
However Grok fashions previous to Grok 3 hedged on political topics and wouldn’t cross sure boundaries. In reality, one examine discovered that Grok leaned to the political left on subjects like transgender rights, variety applications, and inequality.
Musk has blamed the conduct 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 objective, and what the implications is perhaps.
