Musk announces Grok 3 AI model to rival OpenAI's GPT-4o
What's the story
Elon Musk-owned xAI, has launched its latest flagship AI model, the Grok 3.
The new model was introduced alongside improved features for the Grok apps on iOS and web platforms.
The release marks a major milestone in the competitive landscape of AI models, making Grok 3 a worthy competitor to OpenAI's GPT-4o and Google's Gemini.
Grok 3 will analyze images and generate responses to queries, improving the experience of users on Musk's social network, X.
Effort
How was Grok 3 trained?
The development of Grok 3 took place in a massive data center in Memphis, which housed around 200,000 GPUs. Grok 3, according to Musk, uses "10x" more computing power than its predecessor Grok 2 and was trained on an expanded dataset, including court case documents.
Model diversity
A family of models with varying capabilities
Grok 3 isn't a single model but a family of models, each with its own capabilities.
The Grok 3 mini, a smaller version of the model, offers quicker responses but might sacrifice accuracy.
Two other versions, Grok 3 Reasoning and Grok 3 mini Reasoning, are built to carefully "think through" problems before offering solutions.
You can use these reasoning models through the Grok app for complex problem-solving tasks.
Performance
It outperforms competitors in benchmark tests
xAI claims Grok 3 has beaten GPT-4o in benchmark tests such as AIME and GPQA, which test a model's performance on math questions and PhD-level science problems, respectively.
An early version of Grok 3 also scored competitively in Chatbot Arena, a crowdsourced test that pits multiple AI models against each other based on user-preferred responses.
Further, xAI says Grok 3 Reasoning beats the highest version of o3-mini — o3-mini high — on several popular benchmarks.
Future updates
Grok 3 to introduce voice mode
In coming weeks, Grok 3 will get a "voice mode," Musk announced. The model will also be integrated into xAI's enterprise API with the DeepSearch feature.
Currently, Grok 3 is rolling out to X's Premium+ subscribers. There's also a new subscription called SuperGrok for the Grok.com website and the Grok mobile app.
A few months down the line, xAI plans to open-source Grok 2, following its general approach of open-sourcing the previous version when the next one is fully launched.