Elon Musk unveils ‘smartest AI chatbot on Earth’
xAI, the company founded by Elon Musk, announced Grok 3 and said the chatbot is equipped with superior power compared to its competitors.
In the livestream launching Grok 3 on X, which took place from 11am, Musk sat with three members of xAI to discuss the artificial intelligence model he introduced as “the smartest on Earth”. The American billionaire began his presentation by explaining: “The word ‘grok’ means to have a complete and profound understanding of something”.
Grok 3 benchmark. Image: xAI
xAI ran a series of benchmark tests to show that Grok 3 outperformed Gemini 2 Pro, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, GPT 4o, and DeepSeek V3 when it came to Math, Science, and Coding benchmarks.
In addition, Musk and his team said that the model will also have the same reasoning capabilities as DeepSeek R1 and OpenAI o3-mini. Similar to those two models, Grok 3 will display detailed thought sequences, allowing users to see as the chatbot is thinking about a problem. xAI will also “obscure the thinking a little bit” so that other companies cannot copy the chatbot
According to an xAI member, one of the highlights of Grok 3 is the ability to perform deep search similar to ChatGPT. “Deep Search is the first generation of AI Agent systems that are being deployed. It not only helps engineers, researchers, and scientists do coding, but also helps people answer questions, your daily questions,” the person said. “It will really save you a lot of time.”
According to this member, a problem that might have taken users half an hour or an hour to research, now they only need 10 minutes.
Grok 3 will also support voice mode. However, this feature is being finalized and will be available to users in the next few weeks.
Elon Musk (left) and xAI members during the livestream. Photo: xAI
During the livestream, an xAI employee asked Musk when Grok would be launched on a rocket. “Two years,” the xAI founder replied.
When asked if Grok was “a boy or a girl,” Musk said users could set the chatbot to be “any gender they want.” “People are going to love Grok,” he stressed.
TechCrunch reported that xAI used a massive data center in Memphis with 200,000 GPUs to train Grok 3. In the X post, Musk claimed that Grok 3 was developed with “10 times more” computing power than the Grok 2 model. Grok 3 was trained on synthetic data sets using machine learning techniques like reinforcement learning — an effective method for reducing incorrect or imaginary responses produced by AI models, also known as hallucinations. It also significantly reduces the training time of large language models (LLMs).
Musk also said xAI plans to open source Grok 2. “We’ll open source the next version when the next version is done,” he said. “When Grok 3 is done and stable in a few months, Grok 2 will be open source.”
