What is Grok 3, which Elon Musk claims is the ‘smartest AI on Earth’?

Billionaire’s tech company xAI unveils new chatbot it says outperforms the best in the generative AI field

Elon Musk has described the new AI chatbot Grok 3 as being 'scary smart'. Reuters

Elon Musk's tech company xAI has unveiled the latest version of its generative artificial intelligence chatbot, Grok 3, which it claims is more advanced and capable than its rivals.

Grok 3 promises more power and speed, backed by lengthy training and "everyday" updates, the world's wealthiest person said in a livestream on his social media platform X.

"It really should save you a lot of time. So something that might take you half an hour or an hour of researching on the web or social media, you can just ask [Grok 3] to go through that and come back and 10 minutes later it's done an hour's worth of work for you," Mr Musk said.

"That's [what it] really comes down to – and maybe better than if you could've done it yourself."

So what's so special about Grok 3 and what makes it, as Mr Musk claims, "scary smart" and the "smartest AI on Earth"?

How powerful is Grok 3?

According to xAI, Grok 3, whose pre-training concluded in early January, was developed with "more than 10 times" greater computing power than Grok 2.

Data presented by the company indicates that Grok 3 outperforms the top generative AI chatbots in the market – including OpenAI's GPT-4o, Google's Gemini 2 Pro, Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet and China's disruptive DeepSeek V3 – in math, science and coding.

Development of the chatbot was driven by xAI's Colossus, which is believed to be one of the world's largest – if not the most powerful – supercomputers. Colossus, housed in xAI's own data centre in Memphis, has doubled its power to 200,000 Nvidia H100 graphics processing units.

The company said it took 122 days to get the first 100,000 GPUs up and running, and another 92 days to double it. Mr Musk had previously said that the only way for xAI to succeed is to have its own data centre. Colossus is the biggest H100 cluster of its kind, according to xAI.

Reportedly, Colossus was able to provide 200 million GPU-hours of training, which xAI says is 10 times more than that for Grok 2.

"If you're using Grok 3, I think you may notice improvements almost every day, because we're continuously improving the model," Mr Musk said. "Definitely, within 24 hours you'd see improvements."

As an example, Grok 3 was asked to "generate code for an animated 3D plot of a launch from Earth landing on Mars and then back to Earth at the next launch window". The response was a lengthy and very detailed analysis with complex mathematical computations.

"We're seeing the beginnings of creativity," Mr Musk said.

How many Grok 3 models are there?

There are two – Grok 3 and Grok 3 mini, the latter of which comes with limited features.

Specifically, Grok 3 mini would be able to respond more quickly, although that may come at the cost of accuracy.

Still, much like the main Grok 3 model, the mini version either outperforms or is at par with the top rivals, according to xAI's tests.

When will Grok 3 be available and is it free of cost?

The new chatbot has been in development for months, and was initially slated for a release in 2024, a target that xAI missed.

Grok 3 is now available to subscribers of X's Premium+ tier, which costs $22 monthly and $229 annually; that's Dh80 and Dh840, respectively, in the UAE.

The company recommends updating to the latest version of X, to avail Grok's fullest capabilities.

Additionally, xAI unveiled its new SuperGrok subscription, which it says is for "real fans" of Grok, providing guaranteed access to Grok, early access to new features, higher image generation limits, and DeepSearch and Think services.

SuperGrok is priced at $30 monthly and $300 per year.