Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, has officially launched its latest advanced artificial intelligence model, Grok 3, along with new features for the Grok iOS and web applications. The announcement, made late Monday, marks a significant step forward in xAI’s competition against leading models such as OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Google’s Gemini.
What is Grok 3?
Grok serves as xAI’s response to major AI models, offering capabilities like image analysis, question answering, and enhanced reasoning. It also plays a crucial role in powering features on Musk’s social platform, X (formerly Twitter).
Grok 3 has been in development for months and was initially planned for a 2024 release but faced delays. The launch of Grok 3 is an ambitious move by xAI, aiming to push the boundaries of AI capabilities.
Training Grok 3: A Leap in Computing Power
To develop Grok 3, xAI leveraged a massive data center in Memphis, housing approximately 200,000 GPUs for training the model. According to Musk, Grok 3 was trained with ten times the computing power of its predecessor, Grok 2. The training dataset has also been expanded to include diverse sources, such as court case filings and other high-quality data.
Musk confidently stated during a livestreamed presentation:
“Grok 3 is an order of magnitude more capable than Grok 2. It is a maximally truth-seeking AI, even if that truth sometimes contradicts political correctness.”
A Family of AI Models
Instead of a single model, Grok 3 is a family of AI models designed for different levels of performance and speed. One variant, Grok 3 Mini, offers faster responses at the expense of some accuracy, making it useful for general-purpose tasks.
While some Grok 3 models are still in beta, the rollout of the core versions began on Monday.
Benchmark Performance: Grok 3 vs. GPT-4o
xAI claims that Grok 3 outperforms OpenAI’s GPT-4o on various benchmarks, including:
- AIME – Evaluates AI performance on math problems
- GPQA – Assesses problem-solving abilities in PhD-level physics, biology, and chemistry
Additionally, early versions of Grok 3 performed competitively in Chatbot Arena, a crowdsourced AI evaluation where users compare responses from different AI models.
Grok 3 Reasoning: Advanced AI Thought Processing
Two key models in the Grok 3 lineup, Grok 3 Reasoning and Grok 3 Mini Reasoning, are designed for deep logical analysis. These models function similarly to OpenAI’s o3-mini and DeepSeek’s R1, ensuring that responses are well-thought-out before being delivered.
Notably, xAI states that Grok 3 Reasoning outperforms OpenAI’s o3-mini-high on AIME 2025, a cutting-edge mathematics benchmark.
New Grok App Features
The Grok app now offers users new tools for enhanced research and analysis:
✅ “Think” Mode – Encourages deeper AI reasoning
✅ “Big Brain” Mode – Utilizes extra computing power for complex queries
✅ DeepSearch – Scans the internet and X to generate concise summaries of research topics
Subscription Tiers: Accessing Grok 3
- X Premium+ ($50/month) – Provides early access to Grok 3
- SuperGrok ($30/month or $300/year, based on leaks) – Unlocks additional reasoning capabilities, more DeepSearch queries, and unlimited AI-generated images
Upcoming Features: Voice Mode & Enterprise API
In about a week, xAI plans to introduce a “voice mode”, giving Grok 3 a synthesized voice for more natural interactions. A few weeks later, the model will be made available through xAI’s enterprise API, allowing businesses to integrate Grok’s capabilities into their own applications.
Open-Sourcing Grok 2
Musk also announced plans to open-source Grok 2 in the coming months, following xAI’s strategy of releasing the previous version once the latest model is stable.
“When Grok 3 is mature and stable—probably within a few months—we’ll open-source Grok 2,” Musk confirmed.
Musk’s Vision: A Politically Neutral AI?
When Musk first introduced Grok two years ago, he promoted it as edgy, unfiltered, and free from “woke” influences. Early Grok models were more willing to provide controversial responses than AI systems like ChatGPT. However, studies found that Grok 2 leaned left on topics such as transgender rights, diversity programs, and inequality.
Musk attributed this bias to Grok’s training data (primarily sourced from public web pages) and pledged to move Grok toward a more politically neutral stance. It remains to be seen whether Grok 3 achieves this goal and what impact it might have.