Elon Musk’s startup, xAI, has just unveiled its latest AI model. Grok 3, the newest version of the company’s flagship chatbot, is advertised as more powerful than any of its competitors.
Since Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration, Elon Musk has played a pivotal, if polarizing role in world politics. Accused of meddling in international affairs, the tech billionaire has never been quite as controversial as he is today. Elon Musk’s politics might even be costing Tesla sales, which recorded a sharp decline in the US between December and January. For all this political interference, Musk hasn’t lost sight of his business interests, and he is doubling the stakes on his AI efforts.
On Monday, the businessman announced the upcoming release of the next version of xAI’s chatbot. Trumpeting the chatbot as more capable than Grok 2 by a landslide, Musk and his team reaffirmed the startup’s stated goal – understanding the nature of the universe. In a video call at the World Government Summit, held in Dubai last week, the tech mogul described the model as “scary smart,” stating that it had surpassed all other existing models in the company’s internal tests.
Trained on copious synthetic data, and equipped with self-correction mechanisms to ensure logical consistency, the newest iteration of xAI’s chatbot has been given better ratings than its rivals on the benchmark platform Chatbot Arena according to the company. This crowdsourced website compares and analyzes different AI language models in randomized tests, pitting their performances against one another. The reasoning chatbot also introduces the DeepSearch function, described as a hybrid of a new research tool and an early iteration of agent-like capabilities.
Released on Tuesday alongside a live demo, Grok 3 is freely accessible to premium X subscribers. Non-X users can also access the model through a separate “Super Grok” subscription. While Musk reasserted that Grok 3 is “a kind of beta” at the moment, he promised the model would improve rapidly through reinforcement learning. And that promise rings hardly arbitrary, as this advanced chatbot may rise to threaten ChatGPT’s supremacy.
Musk’s move follows the tech billionaire’s ongoing rivalry with OpenAI, marked by public disputes and lawsuits. Just recently, the San Francisco-based company and its board of directors turned down an unsolicited $97.4 billion takeover offer made by a consortium of Musk-led investors. Although the bid failed, the initiative might upset Sam Altman’s plans to transform OpenAI into a for-profit entity.
The unveiling of Grok 3 also comes shortly after a new player has emerged in the AI ecosystem. Released in January by the Chinese startup DeepSeek, and allegedly developed at a significantly lower cost than its peers, the R1 model instantly became a global phenomenon. Its meteoric rise sent shockwaves worldwide, rattling Wall Street as tech stocks tumbled down. Meanwhile, the AI assistant struggled to keep up with so many downloads as to overwhelm its servers. Donald Trump addressed DeepSeek as a “wake-up call” for US tech, urging American firms to be laser-focused on winning the AI race. Presented as “the smartest AI on earth,” Grok 3 seems to be xAI’s answer to this intensifying competition in the tech landscape.
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With DeepSeek effectively disrupting the AI market, and OpenAI striving to restructure its business to remove non-profit control, the AI ecosystem is experiencing tremendous change. And Musk’s xAI is one of the latest players to rock the tech world. Leveraging the company’s Colossus supercomputer, Grok 3 might be the next big thing in generative artificial intelligence.
