On February 17, Elon Musk's xAI company unveiled its new flagship artificial intelligence model, Grok 3, which Musk himself called "the smartest AI on Earth."
It is capable of analyzing images, answering questions, and working as the engine for a number of features on the X social network, which is also owned by Musk. Grok 3 has been in development for several months and was supposed to be released in 2024, but has seen the release just recently.
According to the company during the live broadcast, Grok-3 outperformed competitors, including Alphabet's Google Gemini, DeepSeek's V3, Anthropic's Claude, and OpenAI's GPT-4o, on key math, science, and programming tests.
According to Musk, Grok-3 has 10 times the computing power of the previous version, and its preliminary training was completed in early January. He also noted that the model is constantly being improved: "Literally within 24 hours you will see improvements."
- Grok 3 is represented by a family of models. The smaller version, Grok 3 mini, answers questions faster but is less accurate. Some of the model's features are still in beta testing, but will be implemented gradually.
- The two variants of the new model, Grok 3 Reasoning and Grok 3 mini Reasoning, are similar to models from OpenAI and China's DeepSee that are capable of "reasoning". They operate on the principle of self-checking, which reduces the likelihood of errors.
- In addition to the new AI, xAI introduced DeepSearch, an intelligent search engine that explains the process of processing queries and generating answers. The system provides capabilities for research, brainstorming and data analysis.
- The company also confirmed its intentions to release a voice chatbot in the near future, and in a few weeks, Grok 3 models will be available to enterprises.
Premium+ subscribers will be the first to get access to Grok 3, but as TechCrunch noted, a few hours after the release of the new AI model, X significantly increased the subscription price. Now in the US, it will cost $50 per month or $350 per year.
This is the second price increase in recent months — in December, the rate rose from $16 to $22 per month. The new increase is more than double the previous price.
Other features of Grok 3, including DeepSearch and unlimited image generation, will be available under the new SuperGrok plan ($30/month or $300/year, according to leaks).
