Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, launched Grok-3, a new version of its chatbot

On February 18, Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, launched Grok-3, a new version of its chatbot. The company wants to compete with China’s AI company DeepSeek and Microsoft-backed AI.

Grok-3 was launched at an important time in the AI race, just days after DeepSeek released a strong open-source model. Meanwhile, Musk is working hard to grow xAI’s influence.

The chatbot is now available for Premium+ users on X, the social media platform owned by Musk. xAI is also introducing a new paid plan called SuperGrok for people using the chatbot on its mobile app and website Grok.com.

“Grok-3 is much better than others,” Musk said in a livestream with three xAI engineers on Monday. He also said it is stronger and smarter than the previous version, Grok-2.

“Grok-3 helps xAI compete again in the race for the best open-source AI models,” said Gil Luria, a director at D.A. Davidson. He said Grok-3 is better than some top AI models in tests, making xAI important again. As AI competition grows, xAI is working harder to improve.

xAI is building bigger data centers to train smarter AI models and is raising billions of dollars for this. It’s supercomputer in Memphis, Tennessee, called “Colossus”, is said to be the biggest in the world.

But Luria said Grok-3 is only a little better than Grok-2, and it may not be worth the huge amount of money and resources used to train it.

The new version includes a smart search tool called DeepSearch. xAI says it is a chatbot that can explain its thinking when answering questions.

The tool, shown in the livestream, can help with research, idea generation, and data analysis.

Last week, a group of investors led by Musk offered $97.4 billion to buy OpenAI’s nonprofit assets, but the makers of ChatGPT turned down the offer.