Muhammed Selim Korkutata | Anadolu | Getty Images
Elon Musk’s xAI on Tuesday unveiled its latest artificial intelligence model, Grok 3, claiming it can outperform offerings from OpenAI and China’s DeepSeek based on early testing, which included standardized tests on math, science and coding.
“We’re very excited to present Grok 3, which is, we think, an order of magnitude more capable than Grok 2 in a very short period of time,” Musk said at a demonstration of Grok 3 that was streamed on his social media platform X.
The team also said it was launching a new product called “Deep Search,” which would act as a “next generation search engine.”
Grok 3 will be rolled out for premium X subscribers later in the day, and will also be accessible through a separate subscription for the model’s web and app versions, the xAI team said.
Speaking at The World Governments Summit in Dubai last week Musk had dubbed the model “scary smart,” with powerful reasoning capabilities, claiming it outperformed all other existing models in xAI’s internal tests.
“This might be the last time that an AI is better than Grok,” Musk said at the time, adding that it was trained on “a lot of synthetic data,” and was capable of reflecting upon its mistakes to achieve logical consistency.
The xAI team claimed that an early iteration of Grok 3 had been given better ratings than existing competitors on Chatbot Arena, a crowdsourced website that pits different AI models against each other in blind tests.
Toward the end of the product demo, Musk said that the company will keep improving the model.
“We should emphasize that this is kind of a beta, meaning that you should expect some imperfections at first, but we will improve it rapidly, almost every day,” he said, adding that the voice assistance for the model would be released at a later time.
Intense competition
Musk, who has been quite vocal about the potential dangers of artificial intelligence, started xAI in 2023 entering the generative AI market that includes OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
In September last year, OpenAI launched its most advanced model, the o1, which came with reasoning abilities and was able to solve relatively complex science, coding and math tasks.
Musk, along with Sam Altman, helped create OpenAI as a nonprofit in 2015.
However, in recent years Musk and OpenAI’s leadership have been feuding. Musk recently led an investor group that submitted a proposal to buy the AI startup’s nonprofit parent for $97.4 billion — an offer OpenAI declined.
Last month, Chinese start-up DeepSeek shocked the AI market when it released a technical paper that claimed one of its open source models was able to rival the performance of OpenAI’s o1 model despite using a cheaper, less energy-intensive process.
It accomplished the feat in the face of the U.S. restricting leading AI chipmaker Nvidia from selling its cutting-edge GPUs — used for training AI models — to China.
XAI has a “Colossus supercomputer,” for training AI, which it said last year was utilizing a cluster of 100,000 advanced Nvidia GPUs for AI training. On Tuesday, the company revealed that it doubled the size of its GPU cluster for the training of Grok 3.
While many AI and tech experts have told CNBC that DeepSeek has intensified AI competition, showing what can be done with less advanced technology, others are more skeptical about its impact.
