X has announced the launch of its latest AI model, with Grok 3, which was reportedly trained on 200,000 GPUs, now live for some users.
The latest Grok model has more than 10x the compute power of the previous offering, which X says puts it ahead of competitors in several key benchmarks.
As you can see in this slide, which the X team presented in its live stream launch of the new model, in its testing, Grok 3 outperforms Gemini-2 Pro, DeepSeek-V3, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and GPT-4o, on several key tasks, including math, science, and coding. The xAI team says that Grok 3 also outperforms the competition in general reasoning as well.
Which, if true, could be a big boost for X’s AI ambitions, with the Grok team able to create a competitive AI system in much less time than other projects.
The latest version of its Grok chatbot, meanwhile, will also include a new feature called “DeepSearch”, which will scan the internet, then present in-depth answers to your queries.
That could enable easier, more context-based research, while the system will also be able to provide in-depth summaries and overviews of complex topics.
The final major addition for X’s AI system will be voice mode for Grok, which will enable the system to speak its responses to you, and you to talk back. That’s not available at launch, but X owner Elon Musk says that it’s coming soon.
It’s a significant announcement for the project, which is an offshoot of X itself, using data sourced from X to provide real-time responses to user queries.
Musk originally launched his AI project as a means to counter OpenAI, which he’d been a founding partner in, but was ousted when he sought to take over the project as its CEO. After OpenAI rejected his bid, Musk withdrew future funding to the project, and has since held personal grievances about how the project is run, who’s running it, and losing millions in initial funding for what he believed to be a non-profit project.
Musk has also initiated legal action against the company, and just last week, he launched an unsolicited takeover bid, in his latest effort to crush the initiative.
Grok is Elon’s other avenue to thwarting OpenAI, though in itself, it may also be a viable business, enabling Musk to latch onto the AI wave and drive profit from his Twitter acquisition.
If there’s a way to sell it.
xAI is now reportedly valued at $75 billion, following investment from several backers, and the rapid expansion of its capacity, led by its groundbreaking Colossus AI supercluster in Memphis. That system, which was put together much faster than other AI computing facilities, is what’s enabled the xAI to compete, and it could point to potential expansion under Musk’s leadership.
And if Grok 3 lives up to the hype, it too could help Musk and Co. secure new AI deals, while X users who want to use it to its fullest will also have to pay extra, with a new “SuperGrok” subscription tier set to be priced at $50 per month.
So X will have to work to build a revenue base for the model. But then again, with Elon’s government review project also looking to implement AI solutions to reduce government spending, it could be that xAI will eventually secure significant contracts to fulfil that promise as well.
Yes, that would be a conflict of interest, but that hasn’t seemingly been an impediment to Musk gaining favor from government projects thus far.
Maybe, with this next Grok development, that’ll be the next big announcement for Elon’s AI initiative.
