(Bloomberg) — Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI showed off the updated Grok-3 model, showcasing a version of the chatbot technology that the billionaire has said is the “smartest AI on Earth.”
Most Read from Bloomberg
Across math, science and coding benchmarks, Grok-3 beats Alphabet Inc.’s Google (GOOG, GOOGL) Gemini, DeepSeek’s V3 model, Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s GPT-4o, the company said via a live stream on Monday. Grok-3 has “more than 10 times” the compute power of its predecessor and completed pre-training in early January, Musk said in a presentation alongside three of xAI’s engineers.
“We’re continually improving the models every day, and literally within 24 hours, you’ll see improvements,” Musk said.
The company introduced a new smart search engine with Grok-3, calling it DeepSearch. DeepSearch is a reasoning chatbot that expresses its process of understanding a query and how it plans its response. It includes options for research, brainstorming and data analysis, the demonstration showed. Musk’s team also said it intends to release a voice-based chatbot “as soon as possible.”
Grok-3 is rolling out to Premium+ subscribers on X immediately. The company is starting a new subscription called SuperGrok for the bot’s mobile app and Grok.com website. XAI plans to open-source preceding versions of its Grok models as soon as the latest one is fully mature, with Musk saying he expects that transition to be complete for Grok-3 in a few months.
Musk’s performance claims, which have not been independently verified, ramp up an increasingly bitter rivalry between his startup and OpenAI. He launched xAI in 2023 as an alternative to the ChatGPT maker, which he’s publicly criticized for its plans to restructure as a for-profit business.
The billionaire filed two lawsuits against OpenAI for allegedly straying from its founding principles and offered to buy OpenAI’s nonprofit arm for $97.4 billion in a bid that was rejected last week. OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman classified the bid as a tactic to “slow us down.” Musk was involved in OpenAI’s founding but has been critical of the company since leaving the board in 2018.
After the Grok-3 updates were released, Andrej Karpathy, an OpenAI co-founder no longer at the company, posted a preliminary review of the new model on X, writing that it “feels somewhere around the state of the art territory of OpenAI’s strongest models.” But the computer scientist, who formerly lead AI efforts at Tesla Inc. (TSLA), said Musk’s model also fabricated facts and lagged behind in certain functions. Karpathy said more evaluations are needed over the next days and weeks to get a better idea of the model’s capabilities.
