Elon Musk's xAI Unveils Grok-3, a Revolutionary AI Chatbot to Rival DeepSeek and OpenAI

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Elon Musk's artificial intelligence startup xAI has introduced Grok-3, the latest iteration of its chatbot that integrates with X, formerly Twitter. The 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 boasts of advanced features such as "Big Brain" mode for more complex research tasks and a smart search engine called DeepSearch.

Some of the key features of Grok-3 include:

• Advanced web searching with "deep search"
• The ability to code online games
• A "big brain" mode to reason through more complex problems

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.

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, improvements over the Grok-2 model appear to be too small to justify the enormous resources used to train it. The introduction of Grok-3 puts xAI back in the race for leadership in open-source LLMs, outperforming the current state-of-the-art models on some benchmarks.

Recent developments in the AI space include:

• OpenAI releasing a large language model that can comb through the open internet and conduct more human-esque research for paying subscribers to ChatGPT
• Google adding research functions to Gemini
• Musk leading a group of investors offering to buy OpenAI for $97 billion, which the rival company's board rejected

The billionaire has also urged OpenAI to open-source more of its technology. Asked on Monday about open-sourcing xAI's own models, Musk said the startup would make the code behind its previous Grok 2 model publicly available when Grok 3 is "mature and stable" in the coming months. Hours after the release of Grok 3, X has significantly hiked the price for its top Premium+ subscription plan, which gives users access to the latest model, to almost $50 per month.

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