Elon Musk debuts Grok 3 as the world’s smartest AI

xAI on Monday unveiled its updated Grok 3 Artificial Intelligence (AI) model, as the Elon Musk-led startup pushes to keep pace with the advanced reasoning and search capabilities in competitors’ models.

In an event livestreamed on Musk’s X, leaders at the startup claimed Grok 3 performs better across math, science and coding benchmarks than Google’s Gemini, OpenAI’s GPT-4o, Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 and DeepSeek’s V3 model, although it’s not clear how it compares to other top reasoning models such as OpenAI o3-mini and DeepSeek R1. The company also described the tool’s new features, such as advanced web searching with “deep search,” the ability to code online games and a “big brain” mode to reason through more complex problems.

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Grok 3 is immediately available to members of X’s $40 per month “Premium+” subscription plans, or users who subscribe directly on Grok’s standalone app or website, the prices of which have both just been doubled by Musk – which is ironic because the billionaire polymath recently complained and sued OpenAI for changing its own business model from non-profit to for profit, yet seems happy to charge way over the odds for his own model in a display of weird double standards.

The xAI announcement comes as competition in AI continues to ramp up, with big tech players racing to invest in bigger, stronger data centers to fuel more powerful AI models. Tech giants believe AI is on its way to revolutionizing how people work, communicate and navigate the internet, including by replacing traditional search engines and coding processes.

American tech firms are now also up against a new kind of competition from DeepSeek, the Chinese startup whose recently launched R1 model raised big questions about Silicon Valley’s AI infrastructure investments because it suggested that advanced models could be trained more efficiently. Musk said Grok 3 was built with 10 times the computer power of xAI’s previous model, Grok 2, after the company opened a new data center in Tennessee last year.

The billionaire referred to Grok 3 as “kind of a beta” test for now. “Expect some imperfections at first, but we’ll improve it rapidly,” he said.

Musk also teased a “voice mode” for Grok 3 — similar to the natural conversation feature on competitor apps including ChatGPT — that he said would roll out in the coming days.

At the same time, Musk, who has also taken on a key role reshaping the federal government as a “special government employee” under President Donald Trump, has sought to grow his influence in the AI space.

Musk last week led a group of investors offering to buy OpenAI for $97 billion, the latest move in his ongoing rivalry with the ChatGPT parent company’s CEO Sam Altman, which the rival company’s board rejected. Musk has accused OpenAI of abandoning its mission to help humanity because it plans to transition away from its non-profit structure. The billionaire has also urged OpenAI to open-source more of its technology.

Asked on Monday about open-sourcing xAI’s own models, Musk said the startup would make the code behind its previous Grok 2 model publicly available when Grok 3 is “mature and stable” in the coming months.