Since purchasing X (FKA Twitter), Elon Musk’s team has added several new features and implemented some deep changes to the social media platform. One of the most impressive additions was Grok, an AI-powered chatbot. Now, Musk has revealed that Grok 3, the next big update to the artificial intelligence “assistant,” is very close.
Grok is the flagship product of xAI, the AI division derived from X. It is a chatbot that seeks to compete against ChatGPT, Gemini, and the like. It has the classic features of this type of service, including handling relatively complex requests, answering questions, and generating summaries. It even integrates a free text-to-image generator. Initially, Grok was exclusive to subscribers to a paid plan on X. However, last year Musk released it for free to all accounts.
Elon Musk’s xAI to launch Grok 3 AI in a week or two
Now, speaking at the World Government Summit in Dubai, Elon Musk has announced that Grok 3 is one or two weeks away from launch. “Grok 3 has very powerful reasoning capabilities, so in the tests that we’ve done thus far, Grok 3 is outperforming anything that’s been released, that we’re aware of, so that’s a good sign,” he claimed. There is no official benchmark data yet that would allow us to compare Grok 3’s performance to rivals. It will be interesting to see how it fares on key parameters against ChatGPT and even DeepSeek AI.
Musk noted that it used synthetic data during the training of Grok 3. In January, the owner of X had said that the industry had already exhausted practically all the data available for AI training. So, using synthetic data would allow AI platforms to continue to evolve. Synthetic data is basically data generated by other LLMs rather than taken from the internet or obtained from other companies through deals.
An AI that can “reflect” on its own mistakes
The fact that Musk mentions that Grok 3 has “powerful reasoning capabilities” is also interesting. OpenAI has a couple of models specifically focused on reasoning: OpenAI o1 and o3-mini. Plus, he said that Grok will have the ability to “check” itself. This would allow the AI to “reflect” on its own mistakes to try to ensure the consistency of the outputs. Musk stated that Grok 3 is “scary smart.”
Although it has powerful financial muscle, xAI is a fairly young startup. Musk founded the company in July 2023, so it has been around for less than two years. That said, xAI has managed to attract the attention of AI investors. The firm just raised up to $6 billion in its latest funding round late last year. Grok chatbot arrived on iOS as a separate app in some countries in January. Meanwhile, a pre-registration listing is available in Android’s Play Store.
