Elon Musk unveils Grok 3 AI model

Elon Musk (R) and his AI startup xAI team unveil the Grok 3 AI model during a live stream on the social media platform X on Monday evening.

Elon Musk and his AI startup xAI team announced the Grok 3 AI model in a live stream Monday evening.

The team detailed that the new model is “a magnitude more capable” than Grok 2, indicating Grok 3 has 10 to 15 times more power than Grok 2. They also claim that Grok 3 is more powerful than its competitors such as DeekSeek and Google Gemini.

The xAI team said it has been improving on the Grok 3 AI model over the last several months. It has only been 17 months since the launch of the Grok 1 model.

The team has tested Grok 3 against many scholastic challenges, including the American Invitational Mapping Foundation, which the model matched up well against.

In demos, the xAI team showed how Grok 3 performed interesting tasks, such as computing a spacecraft mission from Earth to Mars and back and creating a game that is a mix of Tetris and Bejeweled. The team also mentioned that Grok 3 includes a feature called Big Brain, which is a reasoning model mode allowing for deeper thinking when processing queries.

Musk noted that 17 months prior, the original Grok model could barely solve high school problems, and now “Grok is ready to go to college,” with its fast progress.

Initially, access to this advanced AI will be exclusive to Premium Plus subscribers on the X platform. Those in the United States can also subscribe to SuperGrok which costs US$30 a month. The introduction of voice interaction further promises to make interactions with Grok3 more intuitive and natural, the team said. They confirmed that Grok 2 will be made open source once Grok 3 is “mature and stable.” 

In addition to Grok 3, the team also mentioned that it is working on an AI gaming studio and developing a Deep Search feature for Grok, which will be xAI’s version of AI agents.

The launch comes amid a global race to develop more advanced and cost-efficient AI tools. In China, DeepSeek, the startup behind a model rivaling OpenAI’s ChatGPT, is aggressively hiring as it looks to expand its capabilities.