Elon Musk's xAI Launches Grok 3: A New Contender in the AI Race

Grok resets the AI race

Alex Heath is a deputy editor and author of the Command Line newsletter. He has been reporting on the tech industry for more than a decade. Just a few weeks after everyone freaked out about DeepSeek, Elon Musk's Grok-3 has again shaken up the fast-moving AI race. The new model is ending the week at the top of the Chatbot Arena leaderboard, while the Grok iOS app is at the top of the App Store, just above ChatGPT. Even as Musk appears to be crashing out from his newfound political power, his xAI team has managed to deploy a leading foundational model in record time. It's one thing to have the leading model; it's another to build the biggest user base around it. Musk seems to understand that if he wants to crush OpenAI, he has to shift attention away from ChatGPT. Since the debut of Grok-3, Musk has said that ChatGPT-like voice interaction and desktop apps are coming soon. Where his product roadmap appears to differ considerably from OpenAI's is xAI's nascent efforts to build an AI gaming studio, though the details there are scarce. While its Deep Research reports are nowhere near as in depth as OpenAI's, Grok-3's "thinking" capabilities appear to be roughly on par with o1, according to Andrej Karpathy, who noted in his deep dive comparison that "this timescale to state of the art territory is unprecedented." Given all this, it's probably not a coincidence that OpenAI decided this week to disclose that ChatGPT now has 400 million weekly active users -- a 33 percent increase from December. Even with its many hooks into X, Grok certainly has far fewer users than that. Now, it's a question of whether OpenAI can maintain its product lead before Grok (and others) catch up. As always, I want to hear from you. Respond here or ping me securely on Signal.

Elon Musk sparks AI rivalry with a meme against ChatGPT and Meta AI as Grok takes centre stage

Remember the penguins from the animated film series of Madagascar? Well, Elon Musk recently shared a meme featuring them to promote Grok AI, his company's chatbot. Elon Musk is often known for his humour and internet culture, and so is his AI. So, his latest meme was adapted from the popular animated film, featuring the iconic penguins, Kowalski, Rico and Private saluting Skipper -- one wearing a captain's cap to depict xAI's Grok's supremacy. His meme hinted that Grok AI could outperform its competitors like Meta's AI, ChatGPT, and Google's Gemini. He just shared the picture of the meme without any caption which garnered about 40.2 million views on X. A user shared their experience with Grok 3 Beta, saying they trained it to understand specific needs and even analyze competitors -- claiming it performed flawlessly while ChatGPT struggled. Another user chimed in, suggesting that Grok might be more powerful than all other AI models combined. A user compared Grok and Copilot by asking both for the score of a soccer match from the previous day. While Grok struggled, stating it was still updating its data, Copilot provided the correct score. However, the user noted that Grok excels when it comes to generating images. This discussion follows Elon Musk's recent launch of Grok 3, an AI model designed for advanced reasoning, in-depth research, and creative problem-solving. Musk emphasized that the goal of xAI and Grok is to deepen humanity's understanding of the universe, even speculating about the existence of extraterrestrial life. While Grok 3 Beta is currently available for free for a limited time, access to its full capabilities will require a paid subscription under the Super Grok plan. Grok is an AI assistant on X that brings a mix of wit and a hint of defiance. Designed to make interactions more engaging, Grok allows users to ask questions, receive answers, and complete various tasks -- all while adding a unique, playful edge to the platform's capabilities.

Behind xAI Grok 3, Elon Musk's 'Maximally Truth-Seeking A.I."

xAI's Grok 3 was built by an elite team of former Big Tech researchers and engineers. On Feb. 18, Elon Musk's xAI unveiled Grok 3, marking the startup's foray into the advanced A.I. reasoning race dominated by players like Google (GOOGL), OpenAI, and China's DeepSeek. In a live stream on X, Musk described Grok 3 as a "maximally truth-seeking A.I." that prioritizes accuracy even when it challenges political correctness and a "major leap forward in reasoning and computational efficiency." Sign Up For Our Daily Newsletter Sign Up Thank you for signing up! By clicking submit, you agree to our <a href="http://observermedia.com/terms">terms of service</a> and acknowledge we may use your information to send you emails, product samples, and promotions on this website and other properties. You can opt out anytime. See all of our newsletters Musk claims Grok 3 outperforms top A.I. models including GPT-4o, Gemini 2 Pro and DeepSeek-V3 on internal evaluations and scored over 1,400 points on LMArena's Chatbot Arena -- an open-source A.I. benchmarking leaderboard developed by UC Berkeley's SkyLab. Grok 3 introduces a new "Think Mode" feature for real-time problem-solving and "Big Brain Mode" for computation-heavy tasks. A standout feature is DeepSearch, an A.I.-powered research tool designed to rival Google Search and A.I.-search alternatives including OpenAI's Deep Research, DeepSeek's Search Mode and Perplexity AI's Pro Search. The A.I. model was built by xAI's elite team of former Big Tech researchers and engineers. Key members include Jimmy Ba, a former student of A.I. pioneer Geoffrey Hinton and Yuhuai "Tony" Wu, a former researcher at Google DeepMind. Leading the engineering effort is Igor Babuschkin, a former engineer at OpenAI, whom Musk personally recruited to build a ChatGPT rival. Babuschkin previously served as X's senior director of engineering. Grok 3 is currently exclusive to members of X Premium+, which costs $40 per month in the U.S. Access to advanced features like DeepSearch and Think Mode reasoning costs an extra $30 per month. What's behind Grok 3' impressive capabilities? According to xAI's blog, Grok 3 leverages Test-Time Compute at Scale (TTCS), a specific implementation of test-time scaling, to power its reasoning. This machine learning strategy enables the A.I. model to dynamically adjust computational resources, ensuring higher accuracy for complex queries while maintaining speed for simpler tasks. Grok 3's TTCS approach could unlock groundbreaking discoveries, including a potential cure for lung cancer if combined with dedicated compute clusters for extended reasoning periods, said Jeetu Patel, chief product officer at Cisco, in a LinkedIn post. "This is the first publicly shared use of Test-time compute cluster at an unprecedented scale, with a reasoning model that is multi-modal and can consume real-time data," he wrote. Moreover, Grok 3's development involved Colossus, a massive supercomputer cluster built by xAI in Memphis, Tenn. The system houses 200,000 Nvidia H100 GPU accelerators. xAI utilized 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs from Colossus to train Grok 3, which delivered 200 million GPU hours, a tenfold increase over the training setup used for Grok 2. Musk said last year the next generation of Colossus training cluster will be five times more powerful. Some are skeptical about the sustainability of xAI's rapid progress, Musk's lofty claims about Grok 3, and its ability to compete with A.I.-search rivals like OpenAI's Deep Research. "Scaling up computing power raises costs and makes model deployment too expensive, it is an unsustainable approach for business in the long run," Lin Qiao, a former senior engineering director at Meta and now CEO of the A.I. infrastructure platform Fireworks AI, told Observer. "Models absorb everything they're trained on, including biases. I don't believe an A.I. can ever be truly neutral," Inna Tokarev Sela, a former machine learning executive at SAP and now CEO of the data intelligence platform Illumex, told Observer. She noted that Grok 3 can match Google Search on general topics -- if xAI keeps accelerating training. "When it comes to specialized topics, Google Search doesn't have an edge over domain-specific A.I. models (Grok), trained on focused data," she said. Likewise, early testing of Grok 3 by Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI and former senior director of A.I. at Tesla, suggests that while DeepSearch is better than Google's Gemini models, it struggles with occasional hallucinations of citations and URLs. "The impression I get of DeepSearch is that it's approximately around Perplexity DeepResearch offering, but not yet at the level of OpenAI's recently released 'Deep Research,' which still feels more thorough and reliable," he wrote in an X post.

Grok 3 vs. DeepSeek: Elon Musk's xAI Unveils the Smartest AI Yet

Elon Musk's xAI Launches Grok 3, Challenging DeepSeek and ChatGPT in AI Supremacy Elon Musk's xAI has launched Grok 3, claiming it to be the most intelligent AI system on the planet. Designed to outperform both ChatGPT and DeepSeek, boasts enhanced logical reasoning, advanced coding capabilities, and superior scientific knowledge. With synthetic data training and a 10X increase in computational power compared to Grok 2, xAI aims to revolutionize the AI landscape. But does Grok 3 truly live up to Musk's bold claims? Musk introduced Grok 3 to X users by declaring it the planet's most intelligent artificial intelligence system. The model is said to be 10X more powerful than its previous model Grok 2 due to increased computational capacity. xAI developers also stated that early evaluations and standardized testing place Grok 3 ahead of its competitors.

Elon Musk launches Grok 3, new xAI chatbot can be used on X or through decicated Grok app

TL;DR: Elon Musk's xAI startup has launched Grok 3, an advanced AI chatbot integrated into X with a dedicated app for iOS and Android. Available to Premium+ subscribers, Grok 3 offers enhanced computing power, a "Big Brain" mode for complex tasks, and a DeepSearch feature. It challenges current AI models and repositions xAI in the open-source LLM race. Elon Musk has announced that his xAI startup has just launched Grok 3, the latest AI chatbot that integrates tightly into X and it even has a dedicated app available on both iOS and Android operating systems. Grok 3 is being rolled out immediately to Premium+ subscribers on X, while we have a new subsciption for xAI is being rolled out called SuperGrok, for users accessing Grok 3 through the mobile app or on the Grok.com website. Grok 3 can generate text and images without the guardrails against sexually aggressive imagery, vulgarity, or the reproduction of well-known people's likenesses. During a livestream sitting with 3 xAI engineers earlier this week, Musk said: "Grok 3 across the board is in a league of its own" . Musk added that Grok 3 far outpaces Grok 2 with "more than 10 times" the computing power, killing it in AI benchmarks across the planet. Musk calls Grok 3 "maximally truth-seeking AI, even if that truth is sometimes at odds with what is politically correct". The SpaceX and Tesla boss says that Grok 3 has a new "Big Brain" mode for those complex research tasks, far and above what a normal AI chatbot can do. Grok 3 features a smart search engine feature called DeepSearch (take that, DeepSeek) which xAI describes as a reasoning-based chatbot capable of articulating its thought process when responding to your queries. Gil Luria, managing director at DA Davidson, said: "The introduction of Grok-3 puts xAI back in the race for leadership in open-source LLMs [large language models]. It outperforms the current state-of-the-art models on some benchmarks, which makes xAI relevant again".

Grok 3 model puts xAI at the top tier of frontier model developers

Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Company's weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. You can sign up to receive this newsletter every week here. In just two years, Elon Musk's xAI has become one of a dozen or so labs capable of developing state-of-the-art AI models. Now xAI is out with its Grok 3 large language model, which beats state-of-the-art frontier models, such as OpenAI's GPT-4o and DeepSeek's V3, in common mathematics, science, and coding benchmarks by a wide margin. Meanwhile, the smaller Grok 3-mini performs at par with the larger competing models. The new Grok model reportedly was trained using unprecedented computing power -- first with a cluster of 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs. A small group of rival developers have been testing an early version of Grok 3, and most say they're impressed, with some caveats. OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy posted on X that Grok 3 exhibited sharp reasoning skills and was able to resolve some complex problems. He estimates that the model is on par with OpenAI's o1-Pro reasoning model and slightly better than DeepSeek-R1 and Google's Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking. However, he did find that Grok 3 choked on some prompts commonly known to give large transformer models trouble, such as determining how many Ls are in "Lollapalooza," for example. Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang posted on X that Grok 3 is a state-of-the-art model and gives it props for achieving the top spot on the Chatbot Arena benchmark. Whereas AI skeptic Gary Marcus, who also posted on X, said that while Grok 3 shows real progress, it doesn't represent a significant leap beyond existing models.