Elon Musk’s xAI claims the newest version of its flagship “Grok” chatbot outperforms rival products offered by the likes of Sam Altman-led OpenAI and China-based DeepSeek — potentially giving the billionaire an edge in the AI arms race.
Dubbed “Grok 3,” Musk’s new AI model scored higher on tests in math, science and coding than OpenAI’s GPT-4o, Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude and DeepSeek’s V3 models, according to a chart released by the startup during a live-streamed launch event late Monday.
Musk said Grok 3 would be “an order of magnitude more capable” than its previous version “in a very short period of time.” Grok 3 used 10 times of the computing power than Grok 2 during its development.
“Grok-3 across the board is in a league of its own,” Musk added.
The chatbot, which was previously described by Musk as “scary smart,” is available to premium subscribers on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Musk’s startup also revealed a new tool called “Deep Search,” an AI search engine powered by Grok that explains the reasoning behind its responses to user queries.
The claims about Grok 3’s performance have yet to be independently verified.
Andrej Karpathy, an OpenAI co-founder and former director of AI at Tesla, said after his initial testing that Grok 3 “clearly has an around state of the art thinking model” and described it as “slightly better” than recent releases by DeepSeek and Google.
Launched in 2023, xAI is in talks to raise $10 billion at a whopping $75 billion valuation, with investment giants such as Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital slated to participate.
Grok 3 launched in the midst of a legal slugfest between Musk and Altman over the future of OpenAI.
Musk co-founded the ChatGPT maker in 2015, but left the firm after disagreements with Altman over its long-term direction.
Musk has a pending federal antitrust lawsuit against OpenAI and its key investor Microsoft.
He is also seeking a preliminary injunction to block Altman’s plans to transform OpenAI from a nonprofit to for-profit entity.
Last week, Altman and his allies flatly rejected Musk’s unsolicited $97.4 billion offer to take control of OpenAI.
Musk had said in a court filing that he would abandon the hostile takeover effort if Altman dropped his plans to become a for-profit.
Elsewhere, DeepSeek caused shockwaves throughout the US tech sector last month after it released an open-source chatbot that was on par with US rivals.
DeepSeek claimed that the model cost less than $6 million to train and that it was developed without access to Nvidia’s most powerful computer chips, which are subject to US export controls and considered necessary to power advanced AI models.
Some experts, including Musk, have expressed doubt about DeepSeek’s claims and asserted that the Chinese firm likely has far more chips than it has publicly admitted.
