Musk debuts Grok-3 AI chatbot to rival OpenAI, DeepSeek

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI showed off the updated Grok-3 model, showcasing a version of the chatbot technology that the billionaire has said is the “smartest AI on Earth”.

Across maths, science and coding benchmarks, Grok-3 beats Alphabet’s Google Gemini, DeepSeek’s V3 model, Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s GPT-4o, the company said via a live stream on Monday. Grok-3 has “more than 10 times” the compute power of its predecessor and completed pre-training in early January, Mr Musk said in a presentation alongside three of xAI’s engineers.

“We’re continually improving the models every day, and literally within 24 hours, you’ll see improvements,” Mr Musk said.

The company introduced a new smart search engine with Grok-3, calling it DeepSearch. DeepSearch is a reasoning chatbot that expresses its process of understanding a query and how it plans its response. It includes options for research, brainstorming and data analysis, the demonstration showed. Mr Musk’s team also said it intends to release a voice-based chatbot “as soon as possible.”

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Grok-3 is rolling out to Premium+ subscribers on X immediately. The company is starting a new subscription called SuperGrok for the bot’s mobile app and Grok.com website. XAI plans to open-source preceding versions of its Grok models as soon as the latest one is fully mature, with Mr Musk saying he expects that transition to be complete for Grok-3 in a few months.

Mr Musk’s performance claims, which have not been independently verified, ramp up an increasingly bitter rivalry between his startup and OpenAI. He launched xAI in 2023 as an alternative to the ChatGPT maker, which he’s publicly criticised for its plans to restructure as a for-profit business.

The billionaire filed two lawsuits against OpenAI for allegedly straying from its founding principles and offered to buy OpenAI’s nonprofit arm for $97.4 billion in a bid that was rejected last week. OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman classified the bid as a tactic to “slow us down”. Mr Musk was involved in OpenAI’s founding but has been critical of the company since leaving the board in 2018.

AI powerhouses like OpenAI and xAI have raised funds at a rapid clip with valuations soaring. Mr Musk’s xAI is in talks to raise about $10 billion in a funding round that would value the company at roughly $75 billion, Bloomberg News reported last week. The company was last valued at about $51 billion, according to data compiled by PitchBook.

OpenAI is in talks to raise as much as $40 billion in a round that would push its valuation to up to $300 billion.

These businesses are also capital-intensive. SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle and Abu Dhabi-backed MGX jointly announced a program in January to deploy $100 billion, with the goal of eventually spending $500 billion, for the construction of data centres and other infrastructure for AI in the US. Dell Technologies is at an advanced stage of securing a deal worth more than $5 billion to provide xAI with servers optimised for AI.

But rival technologies are emerging that could challenge this model and make it easier for new competitors to emerge. Last month, Chinese AI company DeepSeek released a new open-source AI model, called R1, that matched or beat leading US competitors on a range of industry benchmarks. The company said it built the model for a fraction of the cost of its US counterparts. - Bloomberg