Elon Musk’s xAI Introduces Grok-3 AI Chatbot

Elon Musk has touted the latest iteration of xAI’s AI chatbot, known as ‘Grok-3’, which he called an “order of magnitude more capable than Grok-2.”

The launch of Grok-3 was announced in a tweet and live stream on X (formerly Twitter). Musk stressed at the start of the livestream that Grok is a “maximally truth-seeking AI, even if that truth is sometimes at odds with what is politically correct”.

The debut of Grok-3 comes at a critical moment in the AI industry, as established players such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, competes with new arrivals such as China’s DeepSeek chatbot.

Grok-3 chatbot

In comparison Musk’s Grok bot has seen less widespread adoption than DeepSeek, but Musk said that Grok-3 has 15x more compute than its predecessor.

Grok-3 is being rolled out immediately to Premium+ subscribers on the X social media platform.

xAI is also launching a new subscription tier, known as ‘SuperGrok’, for users accessing the chatbot via its mobile app and Grok.com website.

The chatbot can generate texts and images without many of the common guardrails against sexually suggestive imagery, vulgarity or the reproduction of well-known people’s likenesses.

“Grok-3 across the board is in a league of its own,” Musk said during a live stream alongside three xAI engineers late on Monday.

Musk claimed the bot utilised “Big Brain” mode for more complex research tasks than a normal chatbot could conduct.

It also comes with a smart search engine, called DeepSearch, which xAI describes as a reasoning-based chatbot capable of articulating its thought process when responding to user queries.

Trolling Musk

Elon Musk is fighting hard to ensure that xAI and Grok has a place at the AI table in the years ahead.

This includes attempts to derail xAI’s rivals such as OpenAI.

A consortium of investors led by Elon Musk earlier this month had offered $97.4bn to acquire OpenAI’s non-profit assets – an offer that was soundly rejected.

Musk’s lawyers then stated he would withdraw his $97.4 billion offer to buy the non-profit behind OpenAI, but only it drops its plan to convert into a for-profit operation.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had called Musk’s offer “ridiculous”, and that it was “another one of his (Musk’s) tactics to mess with us,” and he had not paid any attention to it, as it “doesn’t matter.”

Altman went even further to dismiss Musk in an interview with Bloomberg TV at the Paris AI Action Summit last week.

“Elon tries all sorts of things for a long time,” said Altman. “This is the latest – you know, this week’s episode. I think he’s probably just trying to slow us down.”

“I wish he would just compete by building a better product (ouch), but I think there’s been a lot of tactics,” Altman said in the interview. “Many, many lawsuits, all sorts of other crazy stuff, now this. And we’ll try to just put our head down and keep working.”

Altman was asked whether Musk is approaching his strategy to combat OpenAI from a position of insecurity. Altman agreed.

“Probably his whole life is from a position of insecurity. I feel for the guy,” Altman said. “I don’t think he’s, like, a happy person. I do feel for him.”