xAI is the AI startup set up by Elon Musk. It has released Grok-3, the latest iteration of its chatbox. It will directly compete with DeepSeek, ChatGPT and Gemini. Musk moves aggressively to expand xAI’s influence.
The chatbot is available to premium subscribers on X. xAI is also launched a new subscription tier — SuperGrok for mobile users and website users.
Grok-3 is in a league of its own. It outperforms its predecessor Grok-2.
Grok-3 puts xAI in the race for leadership in open source LLMs.
xAI is strengthening its data center capacity to train more advanced models. It has a supercomputer cluster in Memphis called Colossus. The latest release comes with a smart search engine Deep Search, a reasoning-based chatbot.
Grok-3 introduces features such as Think Mode which provides step-by-step reasoning for users. There is Big Brain Mode which uses more computational resources to handle complex tasks.
The name Grok is inspired by the character Grok in Robert Heinlein’s science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land. The character was raised in Mars and is meant to convey deep understanding and empathy.
Grok-3 can be accessed on X (formerly Twitter) by subscribing to X-Premium+ service or SuperGrok tier. It costs $30 per month. In India, it is available for Rs. 3470 per month. Grok-2 can be accessed free of cost, and the company is planning to make it open source.
Grok-3 was trained on 2 lac Nvidia H100 GPUs in two stages — initially with 1 lac GPUs followed by further training of 92 days scaling up to 2 lac GPUs. It could have cost $6 billion-$8 billion. Grok-2 was trained on 1 lac GPUs.
Audience is having a wait-and-see approach. There are misgivings about its practical usability. Its responses may be too lengthy or lack in clarity.
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