Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence (AI) company on Monday unveiled the latest version of its chatbot, Grok 3, which the billionaire hopes will find traction in a highly competitive sector contested by the likes of ChatGPT and China’s DeepSeek (深度求索).
“Grok is to understand the universe,” Musk said at the start of the Grok 3 launch presentation.
“We’re driven by curiosity about the nature of the universe — that’s also what causes us to be a maximally truth-seeking AI, even if that truth is sometimes at odds with what is politically correct,” he said.
Photo: Reuters
Musk has promoted Grok 3 as “scary smart,” with 10 times the computational resources of its predecessor that was released in August last year.
The flagship product of his X.AI Corp (xAI) was trained on synthetic data and employs self-correction mechanisms that avoid errors — known as “hallucinations” — that plague some AI chatbots and lead them to process false or misleading data as fact.
Across math, science and coding benchmarks, Grok-3 beats OpenAI’s GPT-4o, Alphabet Inc’s Google Gemini, DeepSeek’s V3 model and Anthropic’s Claude, xAI said via a live stream on Monday.
“Grok 3 has very powerful reasoning capabilities, so in the tests that we’ve done thus far, Grok 3 is outperforming anything that’s been released, that we’re aware of, so that’s a good sign,” Musk said in a video call last week with the World Governments Summit in Dubai.
Grok 3 would be made available first to Premium+ paid subscribers of X before rolling out to other users. xAI is starting a new subscription called SuperGrok for the bot’s mobile app and Grok.com Web site, and plans to open-source preceding versions of Grok models as soon as the latest one is fully mature. Musk said he expects that transition to be complete for Grok-3 in a few months.
After the Grok-3 updates were released, Andrej Karpathy, an OpenAI co-founder no longer at the company, posted a preliminary review of the new model on X, writing that it “feels somewhere around the state of the art territory of OpenAI’s strongest models.”
But the computer scientist, who formerly lead AI efforts at Tesla Inc, said Musk’s model also fabricated facts and lagged behind in certain functions. Karpathy said more evaluations are needed over the next days and weeks to get a better idea of the model’s capabilities.
The upgraded chatbot enters a crowded field with countries racing to introduce more sophisticated — and cost-effective — AI products.
Chinese startup DeepSeek shocked the global AI industry last month with the launch of its low-cost, high-quality R1 chatbot — a direct challenge to US ambitions to lead the world in developing the technology.
Grok 3 is also going up against OpenAI’s chatbot, ChatGPT, pitting Musk against collaborator-turned-archrival Sam Altman.
Musk, who also acts as boss of Space Exploration Technologies Corp and Tesla, launched xAI in July 2023 as an alternative to the ChatGPT maker, which he’s publicly criticized for its plans to restructure as a for-profit business.
The company has been canvassing potential investors in a round of funding for about US$10 billion, which would value the company at about US$75 billion, Bloomberg has reported.
Additional reporting by Bloomberg
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