Elon Musk‘s tech company, xAI, has unveiled Grok 3, which he claims is “the smartest AI on Earth” and an “order of magnitude” better than its predecessor, Grok 2.
Musk discussed the new AI model with some of xAI’s team members in a roughly 45-minute presentation on his social media platform X (formerly Twitter).
Among the demonstrations, the xAI team asked Grok 3 to produce a video game that merges elements of Tetris and Bejeweled, and a new feature called DeepSearch.
xAI describes DeepSearch as a “next-generation search engine,” and claims it can save “hundreds of hours of Google time” by engaging in more extensive online research than a chatbot searching the internet might perform.
“Something that might take you half an hour or an hour of researching on the web, or searching on social media, you can just ask it to do that and come back and in 10 minutes it has done the work for you,” Musk says.
As part of the presentation, the team also showed benchmark test scores that suggest Grok 3 can compete with and beat rivals including DeepSeek v3 and GPT-4o from OpenAI — at least in certain situations.
Musk says the company’s AI mission is to “understand the nature of the universe, figure out what’s going on, where are the aliens, what’s the meaning of life”. He says he wants to oppose “what is politically correct”.
What is xAI’s Grok 3?
xAI was announced in July 2023. when it had only 12 staff members including Musk. It employs more than 900 “AI tutors”, according to Business Insider, and is hiring more.
AI tutors are actual people helping to “refine generative AI models”, according to xAI’s job listings. Despite Musk’s previous vocal opposition to remote working, these fully remote” roles pay between $35 (£28) and $65 (£51) an hour.
Among the roles, xAI is hiring “legal specialist” candidates. Among Grok 3’s claimed capabilities are interpreting legal cases and documents.
Grok 3 is beginning to roll out to subscribers of the X Premium+ tier, which costs £17.50 a month.
xAI has also announced a new tier, SuperGrok, which provides access to newer features and lifts some limits on the amount of access you get. Pricing for this tier has not yet been announced.
An older version, Grok-2, has been free of charge since December 2024. However, free users are limited to 10 messages every two hours and three image analysis actions per day.
The first Grok chatbot launched in May 2024 in the UK has been playing catch-up with rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT in the months since.
