Elon Musk debuts Grok 3, an AI model that he says outperforms ChatGPT and DeepSeek

xAI on Monday unveiled its updated Grok 3 artificial intelligence model, as the Elon Musk-led startup works to keep pace with the reasoning and search capabilities in competitors’ models.

xAI on Monday unveiled its updated Grok 3 artificial intelligence model, as the Elon Musk-led startup pushes to keep pace with the advanced reasoning and search capabilities in competitors’ models. In an event livestreamed on Musk’s X, leaders at the startup claimed Grok 3 performs better across math, science and coding benchmarks than Google’s Gemini, OpenAI’s GPT-4o, Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 and DeepSeek’s V3 model, although it’s not clear how it compares to other top reasoning models such as OpenAI o3-mini and DeepSeek R1. The company also described the tool’s new features, such as advanced web searching with “deep search,” the ability to code online games and a “big brain” mode to reason through more complex problems. Grok 3 is immediately available to members of X’s $40 per month “Premium+” subscription plans, or users who subscribe directly on Grok’s standalone app or website. The xAI announcement comes as competition in AI continues to ramp up, with big tech players racing to invest in bigger, stronger data centers to fuel more powerful AI models. Tech giants believe AI is on its way to revolutionizing how people work, communicate and navigate the internet, including by replacing traditional search engines and coding processes. American tech firms are now also up against a new kind of competition from DeepSeek, the Chinese startup whose recently launched R1 model raised big questions about Silicon Valley’s AI infrastructure investments because it suggested that advanced models could be trained more efficiently. Musk said Grok 3 was built with 10 times the computer power of xAI’s previous model, Grok 2, after the company opened a new data center in Tennessee last year. The billionaire referred to Grok 3 as “kind of a beta” test for now. “Expect some imperfections at first, but we’ll improve it rapidly,” he said.