The Grok 3 is Here! Musk's xAI Releases Its Latest Flagship Model
After teasing the Grok 3 for a while, xAI released the flagship AI model late Monday night, sporting new capabilities.
Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company, xAI, has finally released its latest flagship AI model, Grok 3, late Monday night. The new release boasts new capabilities in the Grok apps for iOS and the web.
Taking the Lead
Grok is xAI's reply to trending models like OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Google’s Gemini. It can analyze images and respond to questions and powers some features on Musk’s social network, X (formerly Twitter). Grok 3 has been in development for several months and was optimistically slated for release in 2024, but it missed that deadline.
Described as an ambitious launch, xAI has been using an enormous data center in Memphis — a data center containing around 200,000 GPUs — to train Grok 3. In a post on X, Musk claimed that Grok 3 was developed with “10x” more computing power than Grok 2, its predecessor. He cited the expanded training data set that ostensibly includes filings from court cases.
“Grok 3 is an order of magnitude more capable than Grok 2,” Musk said during a live-streamed presentation Monday. “[It’s a] maximally truth-seeking AI, even if that truth is sometimes at odds with what is politically correct.”
A Competitive Edge
The Grok 3 is a family of models. The combination features a smaller version of Grok 3, Grok 3 mini, and responds to questions more quickly at the cost of some accuracy. Not all models and related features are available as of yet (and some are in beta), but the rollout began late Monday.
xAI claims that Grok 3 beats GPT-4o on several benchmarks, including AIME, which evaluates a model’s performance on a sampling of math questions, and GPQA, which assesses models using PhD-level physics, biology, and chemistry problems. Additionally, an early version of Grok 3 scored competitively in Chatbot Arena, a crowdsourced test that pits different AI models against each other. Users also vote on their preferred responses, according to xAI.
Furthermore, two variations of Grok 3, Grok 3 Reasoning and Grok 3 mini Reasoning, can carefully “think through” problems, similar to “reasoning” models like OpenAI’s o3-mini and Chinese AI company DeepSeek’s R1. Reasoning models are designed to thoroughly fact-check themselves before giving out results, helping them to avoid some of the pitfalls that normally trip up models.
According to xAI, the Grok 3 Reasoning surpasses the best version of o3-mini — o3-mini-high — on several popular benchmarks, including a newer mathematics benchmark called AIME 2025.
Boasting a Wider Reach
The reasoning models can be accessed via the Grok app. Users can ask Grok 3 to “Think,” or — for more difficult queries — leverage the “Big Brain” mode for reasoning that employs additional computing. xAI describes its reasoning models as best suited for mathematics-, science-, and programming-related questions.
Musk further stated that, in the Grok app, some of the reasoning models’ “thoughts” are obscured to prevent distillation, a method used by AI model developers to extract knowledge from another model. Recently, DeepSeek was accused of distilling OpenAI’s models to create its own, but nothing concrete has arisen from that accusation.
Grok’s reasoning models underpin a new feature in the Grok app called DeepSearch, xAI’s answer to AI-powered “deep research” tools like OpenAI’s deep research. DeepSearch scans the internet and X to analyze information and deliver an abstract in response to a question.
Subscribers to X’s Premium+ tier ($22 per month) will first get access to Grok 3, and other features are gated behind a new plan that xAI’s calling SuperGrok. Priced at $30 per month or $300 per year, SuperGrok unlocks additional reasoning and DeepSearch queries, plus unlimited image generation.
Innovative Additions
In the future — as soon as about a week from now — the Grok app will gain a “voice mode,” Musk said, giving Grok models a synthesized voice. A few weeks later, Grok 3 models will arrive in xAI’s enterprise API, along with the DeepSearch capability. Also, xAI has plans to open-source Grok 2 in the coming months, said Musk.
“Our general approach is that we will open-source the last version [of Grok] when the next version is fully out,” he continued. “When Grok 3 is mature and stable, which is probably within a few months, then we’ll open-source Grok 2.”
Elon has pledged to improve Grok's outlook on several topics, including being politically neutral on tough issues and moving ahead of competitors like ChatGPT.
