Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI has introduced Grok-3, the latest iteration of its chatbot that integrates with X, formerly Twitter.

Grok-3 debut comes at a critical moment in the AI arms race as Musk looks to compete with the Chinese AI firm DeepSeek, Microsoft-backed OpenAI and Google. Musk’s bot has seen less widespread adoption than DeepSeek’s namesake chatbot, which wowed the world weeks ago and caused panic in stock markets, as well as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.

Grok-3 is being rolled out immediately to Premium+ subscribers of X, the social media platform owned by Musk. xAI is also launching a new subscription tier, SuperGrok, for users accessing the chatbot via its mobile app and Grok.com website. The chatbot can generate texts and images without many of the common guardrails against sexually suggestive imagery, vulgarity or the reproduction of well-known people’s likenesses. X users have deployed the chatbot to mock political figures, including Musk himself, create deepfakes of celebrities and manipulate copyrighted material.

“Grok-3 across the board is in a league of its own,” Musk said during a live stream alongside three xAI engineers late on Monday. He added the new model outperforms its predecessor, Grok-2, boasting of “more than 10 times” the computing power of the previous version and passing AI industry benchmark tests with flying colors. He called the bot “maximally truth-seeking AI, even if that truth is sometimes at odds with what is politically correct”. The billionaire CEO regularly spreads falsehoods to his 200 million followers on X.

Musk said the bot leveraged “Big Brain” mode for more complex research tasks than a normal chatbot could conduct. The latest release introduces a smart search engine, called DeepSearch, which xAI describes as a reasoning-based chatbot capable of articulating its thought process when responding to user queries. The tool, demonstrated during the live stream, offers functions for research, brainstorming and data analysis. Two weeks ago, OpenAI released a large language model that can similarly comb through the open internet and conduct more human-esque research for paying subscribers to ChatGPT. Google has also added research functions to Gemini.

“The introduction of Grok-3 puts xAI back in the race for leadership in open-source LLMs [large language models]. It outperforms the current state-of-the-art models on some benchmarks, which makes xAI relevant again” said Gil Luria, managing director at DA Davidson.

As competition in AI intensifies, xAI is ramping up its data center capacity to train more advanced models by raising billions of dollars. Musk touts its supercomputer cluster in Memphis, Tennessee, called “Colossus”, as the largest in the world.

However, Luria said improvements over the Grok-2 model appear to be too small to justify the enormous resources used to train it.

Last week, a consortium of investors led by Musk offered $97.4bn to acquire OpenAI’s non-profit assets, an offer the ChatGPT-maker rejected.

Aside from xAI, Musk himself has been engaged in a rapid reformation of the US federal government under Donald Trump. Asked on the day of Grok-3’s release to describe his efforts in Washington, the chatbot responded: “Musk’s involvement in the federal government has thus far been characterized by rapid, sweeping changes aimed at efficiency, but it has also sparked controversy over the methods, legality, and ethics of his approach. His actions are part of a broader Trump administration agenda to reduce the size and scope of government but have been uniquely aggressive and controversial due to Musk’s personal involvement.”

• Elon Musk
• Artificial intelligence (AI)
• Technology startups
• Computing
• DeepSeek
• OpenAI
• Google
• news