Grok 3 wades into the AI wars with 'beta' rollout

Grok 3 has begun rolling out. xAI founder Elon Musk describes the chatbot as "a maximally truth-seeking AI, even if that truth is sometimes at odds with what is politically correct."

According to the startup, pre-training of Grok 3 was completed in early January, and training is ongoing. Likewise, a huge datacenter was constructed for the purpose. Development began in April, and xAI said that in 122 days, the facility reached 100,000 GPUs training synchronously. It took another 92 days to expand the facility to 200,000 GPUs, apparently.

It sounds like a big number, but is it really? Not when compared to the company's rivals. The rate of progress is remarkable, yet xAI sits behind OpenAI. It does, however, try to make up for this with a selection of benchmarks that put Musk's AI platform allegedly ahead of the competition.

During a short presentation, the xAI team talked up Grok 3's superiority in science, mathematics, and coding when compared to other models on the market such as OpenAI's. It goes without saying that a hefty pinch of salt is required when looking at any benchmarks produced in the tech industry – not just the AI ones. And as always, these models will all hallucinate, confidently get things wrong, and so on.

xAI says Grok 3 was developed with ten times the compute power of its predecessor. Musk claimed the figure was nearer 15 times during a launch presentation this week.

The demonstrations given by xAI were noteworthy, if not groundbreaking. For coding, the team asked Grok 3 to come up with a game that combined Tetris and Bejeweled, and after a short pause, the service seemingly produced a playable game that did indeed combine the best of both worlds.

In a nod to Musk's Martian ambitions, the team asked for a trajectory to Mars and back, and Grok 3 produced a mission plan replete with animations. It also reported on the progress of another Musk project – SpaceX's Starship.

While neither demo will set the world alight, they do highlight the breakneck pace of Grok's development. Grok 2, which debuted in 2024, will be made open source once Grok 3 is declared mature and stable, it is claimed.

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Premium+ subscribers on Musk's social media platform, X, will be the first to get their hands on the updated service. There is also an upgrade to "SuperGrok," which, according to xAI, will give early access to new features and include higher image generation limits. The price of SuperGrok was not disclosed during the presentation, although the monthly cost of a Premium+ subscription on X is $40 in the US or £17 in the UK.

Musk said a conversational version was in the works and cautioned that what was being deployed this week was more a beta than anything else. "If you want a more polished version, maybe wait a week," he said.

Other features that will appear in the coming weeks and months include Grok 3's models in the xAI enterprise API and the implementation of memory in conversations.

Grok 3 – even with its ability to scour the internet for answers to questions – is unlikely to ruffle too many feathers, and we can well imagine competitors such as OpenAI moving swiftly to produce benchmarks demonstrating their own superiority.

However, it is the pace of development that will give rivals pause for thought. Even in the fast-moving world of AI, the rapid debut of Grok 3 – though slightly later than the end-of-year timeline Musk boasted about in 2024 – along with its enhancements over its predecessor, is impressive. ®