S Poddar
Elon Musk’s AI venture, xAI, has launched its newest AI model, Grok 3, claiming it outshines top models by competitors such as OpenAI and China’s DeepSeek. Based on initial testing, which included math, science, and coding evaluations, Grok 3 showed better performance.
“We’re really looking forward to showing you Grok 3, which we think is much more powerful than Grok 2 in a very short space of time,” Musk said in an impromptu demo of the model on his social media site, X.
The release of Grok 3 also saw the addition of a new feature known as “Deep Search,” which has been referred to as the second generation of search technology. This improved tool seeks to revolutionize the way people access and engage with information online.
Grok 3 will go live on Tuesday for X premium subscribers in the United States. Users will also be able to use the model via a standalone subscription for the web and app versions of Grok.
At the World Governments Summit in Dubai last week, Musk referred to the AI model as “scary smart,” emphasizing its powerful reasoning capabilities. He claimed that, based on internal assessments, it had outperformed all existing AI models developed by xAI’s competitors.
“This could be the last time that an AI is more intelligent than Grok,” Musk said, adding that Grok 3 was learned on a vast amount of synthetic data. He pointed out its capacity to learn from past errors, refining its logical consistency and accuracy as a whole.
As reported by the xAI team, an initial version of Grok 3 scored more highly than competitors on Chatbot Arena, a crowdsourced benchmarking platform in which various AI models are tried and compared against one another through blind tests.
With the product demo concluding, Musk promised users that things would keep getting better.
“This is basically a beta version, so you can anticipate some flaws in the beginning,” he said. “But we will improve it quickly, even on a day-to-day basis.” He added that voice command functionality for Grok 3 would be launched later.
The Expanding AI War
Musk has long voiced fears about the dangers of artificial intelligence, but he went ahead and founded xAI in 2023 to contend in the fast-growing generative AI space. The market is controlled by incumbents such as OpenAI, whose ChatGPT has become the gold standard for AI-powered language models.
Last year in September, OpenAI launched its most sophisticated model, the o1, which showed enhanced reasoning capabilities and a capacity to solve complex problems in science, coding, and mathematics.
Musk, who co-founded OpenAI in 2015 alongside Sam Altman as a nonprofit initiative, has since had a contentious relationship with the organization. Recently, he led an investor group that offered $97.4 billion to acquire OpenAI’s nonprofit parent company, a proposal that was ultimately declined.
Last month, the AI industry was shaken when the Chinese startup DeepSeek published a research paper claiming its open-source model could rival OpenAI’s o1, despite being trained using a less expensive and more energy-efficient process.
DeepSeek’s success was especially remarkable in light of the U.S. government’s ban on the export to China of sophisticated Nvidia GPUs—vital hardware for training AI models. In light of this obstacle, DeepSeek was successful in building a model that could compete at the very best of AI performance.
While this, xAI has been investing significantly in compute resources. It runs a supercomputer, which it calls Colossus, specifically for training AI. In the previous year, it employed a cluster of 100,000 high-end Nvidia GPUs to develop AI. On Tuesday, xAI announced that it doubled the capacity of its GPU cluster to train Grok 3.
Industry analysts are still at odds with how DeepSeek’s improvements have affected the industry. Some think that it has fueled AI competition by showing that even more cost-effective technology is possible, while others doubt its effect in the long run.
As Grok 3 hits the market, xAI is looking to establish itself as a force to be reckoned with in the AI sector. With development of AI speeding up by the day, rivalry between top players will only see more innovation within the sector.
