Elon Musk’s xAI has released its latest AI model Grok 3, which the company is describing as the “smartest AI on Earth.” It includes reasoning capabilities and a new web analysis tool called DeepSearch that returns results “within seconds” and can refine specific sources, according to xAI. Grok 3 was trained with 200,000 Nvidia GPUs, resulting in improved response times and processing power. Future capabilities will include Voice Mode for conversational interaction and audio-to-text conversion. Access to Grok 3 is limited to X Premium+ subscribers or via a SuperGrok plan (that does not include X social features).

“We’re very excited to present Grok 3, which we think is an order of magnitude more capable than Grok 2, in a short period of time,” Musk said in a benchmark-loaded Grok 3 intro on X. It’s been six months since the debut of Grok 2.

Grok.com and the mobile apps still offers free access to Grok 2, which also comes with the $8 per month basic X Premium subscription. Premium+ subs who log into the platform directly or via web or mobile using their X credential can access Grok 3 or Grok 3 mini.

Quoting Musk from the recent World Governments Summit in Dubai, CNBC said he “had dubbed the model ‘scary smart,’ with powerful reasoning capabilities, claiming it outperformed all other existing models in xAI’s internal tests,” going on to boldly proclaim that “this might be the last time that an AI is better than Grok.”

The Verge explains “there are two Grok 3 reasoning modes available: ‘Think,’ which will display Grok’s reasoning as it resolves requests; and ‘Big Brain’ for complex tasks that require more computational power.”

Grok 3 was trained on a supercomputer called Colossus, built by xAI at a data center in Memphis, Tennessee. The supercomputer uses Nvidia’s Spectrum-X Ethernet, officially released in May 2024 as the world’s first ethernet networking platform purpose-built for AI.

“In a post on X, Musk claimed Grok 3 was developed with “10x” (or so) more computing power than its predecessor, Grok 2, using an expanded training set that includes filings from court cases — and more,” according to TechCrunch.

Musk was joined in the live stream presentation by xAI co-founders Jimmy Ba, “leading research,” and Tony Wu, “working on the reasoning team.” They were joined by engineer Igor Babuschkin.

Ba explained that Grok 3 had been tested on the LMSYS leaderboard for testing large language models “and claimed even early versions of Grok 3 were outperforming rivals like Gemini 2 Pro, DeepSeek-V3, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and GPT-4o,” Mashable reports. In this blind test, the early version of Grok 3 achieved a 1400 score across all categories, an unprecedented achievement, Ba said.

While Grok 3 is multimodal in that it understands and generates images in addition to text, it has no video capability and audio is “coming soon.”

The release of Grok 3 came three days after Musk’s $97.4 billion buyout proposal was rebuffed by OpenAI.

Related:
X Doubles Its Premium+ Plan Prices After xAI Releases Grok 3, TechCrunch, 2/19/25