“xAI,” an artificial intelligence (AI) start-up founded by Elon Musk, unveiled the company’s latest version of chatbot “Grok 3” on the 17th.
Since its establishment in July 2023, it has been six months since it first introduced “Grok” in November of that year and released “Grok 2” in August last year.
In addition to ChatGPT developer OpenAI, Google, Facebook parent Meta Platforms, and Anslogic are also upgrading their own AI models, which is expected to accelerate competition.
In a livestreamed presentation on the same day, xAI explained that Grok 3 outperformed Alphabet’s Google Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s GPT-4o in math, science and coding benchmark tests.
The comparison also included the V3 model of Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, which surprised the world with its highly cost-effective model.
Musk appeared at the presentation with three engineers to explain “Grok 3.” “Grok 3” was trained at a large data center in Memphis with more than 200,000 GPUs.
He said the pre-training process was completed in early January, with Grok 3’s computational power “more than 10 times” compared to its previous version.
“We continue to improve our models every day, and we’ll see improvements in literally 24 hours,” he said.
He added, “Grok 3 is an AI that seeks truth as much as possible, even if it sometimes conflicts with politically correct views.” The Grok 3 consists of a small version of the Grok 3 mini and a suite of reasoning models, the Grok 3 inference and the Grok 3 mini inference models.
The inference model is similar to the inference model o3-Mini, DeepSeek’s R1 released by OpenAI last month. These models review themselves before providing results to reduce errors.
xAI highlighted that the inference model, the Groch3 inference model, outperformed the most performing model of OpenAI’s o3-mini-series on several key benchmarks.
Along with Grok 3, xAI introduced a new intelligent search engine called DeepSearch.
DeepSearch is an inferential chatbot with the ability to express how you plan your answers along with the process of understanding when asked.
This is similar to the ChatGPT search launched by OpenAI in November last year, challenging Google, which accounts for 90% of the global online search market, following ChatGPT.
In the DeepSearch demonstration, xAI also introduced options for data research, brainstorming, and data analysis.
Right after the announcement, Grok 3 has been distributed to social media X’s “premium+” subscribers, and xAI has decided to offer a new subscription product called “Super Grok” on its mobile app and website.
Musk explained that within the next few weeks, the voice mode of the Grok 3 will be added, and an earlier version of the Grok 2 will be released open-source in the coming months.
Musk also said that his space company SpaceX plans to send “a Tesla humanoid robot Optimus and a rocket Starship equipped with Groc AI to Mars.”
He said that the best time to go from Earth to Mars occurs periodically, and that the opportunity will be held at the end of next year. Musk hopes that Grok3 will secure a position in the AI chatbot market, where OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and China’s low-cost and high-efficiency Generative AI Dipshik are competing.
Musk, along with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, was one of the 11 founding members who created OpenAI in 2015 and invested $45 million in the initial investment, but three years later, he resigned as director of OpenAI and disposed of all his investment shares.
Later, when OpenAI launched ChatGPT in 2023, Musk sparked the conflict by criticizing OpenAI for unfairly pursuing profit with AI technology.
In July of the same year, he established xAI and introduced ‘Grok’ and ‘Grok 2’ in order, saying he would counter AI companies seeking profit such as open AI.
Last year, he also filed a lawsuit against OpenAI executives such as Sam Altman.
Musk offered to buy OpenAI’s assets worth $97.4 billion by forming a consortium with investment funds and others, but the OpenAI board officially rejected it on the 14th.
SAM KIM
US ASIA JOURNAL
