Elon Musk has introduced a new iteration of his artificial intelligence chatbot, named Grok 3, just days after OpenAI dismissed the billionaire’s offer to acquire the company, which he co-founded with Sam Altman and others in 2015.
Musk’s company, xAI, asserted during a livestream announcement on the Musk-owned social media platform X that Grok 3 outperforms rivals such as OpenAI’s GPT-4o, Alphabet’s Google Gemini, DeepSeek‘s V3 model, and Anthropic’s Claude.
With the launch of this latest AI chatbot, xAI aims, according to Musk, to “understand the universe,” addressing questions like, “Where are the aliens?” “What is the fate of the universe?” and “What initiated its existence?”
According to xAI engineers, Grok 3 boasts over 10 times the computational power of its predecessor, Grok 2, as they shared in a one-hour livestreamed presentation on X.
However, the company’s assertions regarding the AI’s processing power and effectiveness in areas such as mathematical reasoning, scientific understanding, and coding have not been independently verified.
During the X livestream, xAI showcased Grok 3, demonstrating its ability to compute a launch trajectory from Earth to Mars and back at a specified future date. Musk and his team also challenged it to design a game combining elements of Tetris and Bejeweled, with a request to “make it extraordinarily great.”
The company highlighted that Grok 3 is continuously learning, and users can anticipate daily enhancements to the AI’s capabilities.
Andrej Karpathy, the former AI director at Tesla and a founding member of OpenAI, conducted a “quick vibe check” on Grok 3, sharing his impressions of the tool on X.
He commended its “state-of-the-art thinking model,” claiming it is on par with OpenAI’s and surpasses DeepSeek’s, Gemini’s, and Claude’s offerings.
Despite this praise, he pointed out concerns regarding Grok 3’s “sense of humor,” describing it as “overly sensitive” to ethical considerations.
What is the cost?
Currently, the tool is available to Premium+ X subscribers, who pay $22 monthly for the service.
In comparison, OpenAI’s GPT-4o is priced at $200 per month.
Musk established xAI in 2023 to rival OpenAI, which he departed in 2018 and has since criticized for its shift to a for-profit model. Last week, OpenAI unanimously rejected Musk’s $97.4 million takeover proposal for the AI firm.
“OpenAI is not for sale, and the board has unanimously declined Mr. Musk’s recent attempt to disrupt his competition,” stated OpenAI chairman Bret Taylor on X. “Any potential restructuring of OpenAI will reinforce our nonprofit mission to ensure that AGI [artificial general intelligence] benefits all of humanity.”
