Elon Musk's xAI unveiled Grok-3 on Tuesday, announcing that the new artificial intelligence model has "more than 10 times the computing power" of its predecessor. xAI said that in early testing, its latest flagship outperformed OpenAI's GPT-4o, Google's Gemini and DeepSeek's V3 models, and now has "advanced inference" capabilities.
So-called inference models are trained to answer more complex questions by breaking down instructions into smaller tasks and attempt to fact-check before providing a solution, with the goal of delivering stronger results. Competitors have developed similar models, including OpenAI’s o1, DeepSeek’s R1 and Google’s GeminiFlashThinking.
Grok-3 is available in two inference modes: "xAI will also launch a Grok AI agent product called Deep Search, which the company describes as a "next generation search engine."
Musk said Grok-3 is an "artificial intelligence that pursues truth to the maximum extent - even if that truth sometimes goes against political correctness." Previous versions of the xAI chatbot had been criticized for spreading election misinformation and had fewer safeguards for text-to-image generation, allowing it to spit out problematic or offensive images. OpenAI is also exploring how to develop its models to "seek the truth" when dealing with controversial topics, but with the aim of maintaining a certain safe trajectory.
Grok-3's inference capabilities are available in the Grok app to users of XPremiumPlus, now starting at $40 per month. This is the second price increase for PremiumPlus in two months, rising from $16 to $22 in December. xAI said it will also launch a new subscription plan called SuperGrok, which will provide "the most advanced features and the earliest access to new features." SuperGrok reportedly costs $30 per month, but it's unclear if that's in addition to the X subscription plan.
Elon Musk said the Grok chatbot will soon get a synthesized voice feature that sounds similar to OpenAI's ChatGPT advanced voice mode.