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Elon Musk’s startup xAI is scheduled to release the AI chatbot Grok 3 today at 8:00 p.m. Pacific time, according to a post by Musk on X (formerly Twitter). Positioned as a direct competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Grok 3 is expected to showcase advanced reasoning capabilities.
Musk aims to raise the bar on AI chatbots
The billionaire announced Grok 3’s launch last week during a video call at the World Government Summit in Dubai, touting the chatbot as having “very powerful reasoning capabilities” and being the “smartest AI on earth.’’
The AI model was trained on a lot of synthetic data and is designed to self-correct by analyzing inconsistencies, Musk said. If Grok 3 has data that is wrong, it will remove it, he added.
“Grok 3 is scary smart … [it] has very powerful reasoning capabilities, so in the tests that we’ve done thus far, Grok 3 is outperforming anything that’s been released, that we’re aware of, so that’s a good sign,” Musk said.
How Grok 3 fits into the competitive AI market
Grok 3’s launch comes on the heels of the January launch of DeepSeek R-1, which took the AI world by storm and sent the Nasdaq into a dramatic decline with tech stocks. The Chinese startup’s two large language models (LLMs) – DeepSeek R-1 and DeepSeek V-3 – can reportedly solve scientific problems at a similar level to ChatGPT.
Perhaps the biggest shock was DeepSeek’s claim that it only spent about $6 million to train its model — much less than OpenAI’s o1. While some tech experts have questioned that amount, governments and AI companies worldwide are striving to develop AI chatbots that are more sophisticated and cost-effective.
Bad blood between Musk and OpenAI cofounder Sam Altman
Musk’s Grok 3 announcement is the latest strike from the world’s richest man, who cofounded OpenAI with Sam Altman as a non-profit in 2015. Following a longstanding feud between the two over the company’s direction, Musk and a consortium of investors offered $97.4 billion to buy the assets of OpenAI’s nonprofit. OpenAI has said it wants to become a for-profit organization to secure the capital it needs to develop the best AI models.
In August 2024, Musk sued OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and others and has asked a U.S. district judge to block OpenAI’s attempt to transition to a for-profit entity. OpenAI said last week that Musk’s bid conflicted with his lawsuit, and then on Feb. 14 rejected his takeover offer.