Elon Musk launches Grok 3 AI, ‘the smartest AI on earth’: All the details

Grok AI

A smarter AI chatbot from xAI—the Elon Musk-owned AI company—has arrived. At a launch demo event, Musk said, “We’re very excited to present Grok-3, which is, we think, an order of magnitude more capable than Grok-2 in a very short period of time.”

He praised the team behind Grok AI, saying, “Thanks to the hard work of an incredible team, and I’m honored to work with such a great team.” The demo event, which was live-streamed, had nearly 100,000 viewers tuning in.

Grok-3 vs. the Competition

xAI shared benchmark comparisons, showing that Grok-3 outperformed some of the biggest names in AI, including Google's Gemini 2 Pro, DeepSeek V3, and OpenAI's GPT-4o, especially in science, coding, and math.

Musk also explained why they chose the name Grok, saying, “The term comes from Robert Heinlein’s novel Stranger in a Strange Land. It’s used by a character raised on Mars and means to fully and profoundly understand something.” He emphasized that deep understanding and empathy are key aspects of the chatbot’s capabilities.

What’s new with Grok-3?

One of the biggest upgrades is its raw power—Grok-3 has more than 10 times the computing capability of its predecessor, the team claimed. Musk revealed that the model completed pre-training in early January and is already improving daily. “Literally within 24 hours, you’ll see improvements,” he said.

Another major upgrade that Grok 3 gets is the DeepSearch tool, a new AI-powered smart search engine. Unlike regular chatbots, DeepSearch doesn’t just answer questions-it explains its thought process, how it understands queries, and how it formulates responses. Notably, a similar tool was launched by Perplexity AI called DeepResearch tool.

Grok-3 is rolling out immediately for Premium+ subscribers on X (formerly Twitter). xAI is also launching a new subscription plan called SuperGrok for users on the Grok mobile app and Grok.com website.

xAI vs OpenAI

Musk has been extremely critical of OpenAI, the company he helped co-found but later distanced himself from. Recently, he even filed two lawsuits against OpenAI.

Musk accused the company of moving away from their original mission. He also made a bold offer to buy OpenAI’s nonprofit arm for $97.4billion, but the offer was rejected. OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, called it an attempt to slow them down.

xAI is currently in talks to raise around $10 billion, which could push its valuation to $75 billion.  OpenAI, on the other hand, is reportedly seeking $40 billion in funding, which could raise its valuation to $300 billion.

Grok 3 infrastructure challenges

Building the smartest chatbot AI like Grok-3 requires serious infrastructure. xAI executives shared how they had to build their own data center from scratch in just four months to meet their launch goals. The team managed to get 100,000 GPUs up and running in 122 days and then doubled that capacity in just 92 days—a massive achievement.

Meanwhile, other companies are betting big on AI infrastructure. Dell Technologies is reportedly finalizing a $5 billion deal to provide xAI with high-performance AI servers. Other than that, tech giants like SoftBank, Oracle, and Abu Dhabi-backed MGX have announced plans to invest up to $500 billion in AI data centers and infrastructure.