Elon Musk introduces Grok 3, a chatbot hailed as the “smartest AI on Earth”

xAI, the AI company created by Elon Musk, has unveiled its newest chatbot, Grok 3. During a live demo event on Monday 17 February, the tech billionaire said of the technology: “We’re very excited to present Grok 3, which is, we think, an order of magnitude more capable than Grok 2 in a very short period of time.”

Beginning the demo, which was watched by nearly 100,000 people, Musk explained the origin of the name ‘Grok'. "The term comes from Robert Heinlein’s novel Stranger In A Strange Land,” he revealed. “It’s used by a character raised on Mars and means to fully and profoundly understand something. The word ‘grok’ conveys deep understanding, and empathy is an important part of that.”

During the showcase, Musk touted Grok 3 as “the smartest AI on Earth”, demonstrating the chatbot’s capabilities with various benchmark tests and visual data. According to the entrepreneur and his team, Grok 3 – which is actually a family of models, rather than a single entity – is designed to function on three distinct levels: ‘DeepSearch’ for in-depth information retrieval, ‘Think’ for straightforward reasoning tasks, and ‘Big Mind’ for more complex and creative challenges. 

This latest player in the AI market is trained on synthetic data and employs self-correction features to prevent mistakes – commonly known as ‘hallucinations’. These issues can sometimes cause AI chatbots to present inaccurate or misleading information as if it were true. The new chatbot will operate on xAI’s Colossus supercomputer, which reportedly uses more than 100,000 hours of Nvidia GPUs to train its AI models. 

Musk added that Grok3 will undergo daily improvements with a voice interaction feature set to be introduced soon. In response to a question from an audience member about Grok's gender, Musk replied, “Grok is whatever you want it to be,” further asserting, “People are going to fall in love with Grok. That’s 1,000% likely.”

Grok 3 will first be made available to Premium+ subscribers of X – formerly Twitter – before rolling out to other users. Additionally, xAI announced Super Grok, a separate subscription that offers the most advanced Grok features and priority access to future updates. This premium subscription can be used across both the Grok app and the new grok.com website.

In an increasingly cut-throat sector, the launch of Grok 3 is an important milestone for xAI. The company – which was established by Musk in March 2023 – faces tough competition from Western tech giants OpenAI and Google, while also contending with emerging Chinese firms such as DeepSeek.

With one eye clearly on his rivals’ recent progress, Musk additionally revealed during the demonstration that xAI would be establishing an AI gaming studio. “If you’re interested in joining us and developing AI-driven games, please come aboard. We’re announcing the launch tonight,” he challenged.

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