Billionaire Elon Musk's company launches AI chatbot that is so smart it's scary

On February 18, billionaire Elon Musk's xAI company announced its latest artificial intelligence (AI) model, named Grok 3.

Mr. Musk rated this AI model as "the smartest on earth" when he declared it superior to GPT-4o of OpenAI Company (USA) and model of DeepSeek Company (China) based on initial tests, including standard tests in mathematics, science and programming.

"We are very excited to introduce Grok 3. In our opinion, this AI is capable of being one level stronger than Grok 2 in a very short period of time," billionaire Musk said at the Grok 3 launch livestreamed on his social networking platform X.

xAI also introduced a new intelligent search engine with Grok-3 called Deep Search. Deep Search is a reasoning chatbot that can demonstrate the process of learning keywords and how to respond. It includes research, brainstorming, and data analysis options.

Grok 3 will be available to Premium subscribers on X starting February 18, starting in the U.S. The company will sell the new SuperGrok subscription for the Grok mobile app and Grok.com website.

Billionaire Elon Musk launches Grok 3 model

Last week, at a conference in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE), Mr. Musk said the model was "scary smart" with strong reasoning abilities.

The billionaire claims it outperformed all other existing models in xAI's internal tests.

xAI says an early version of Grok 3 has received better reviews than current competitors on Chatbot Arena, a crowdfunding site where different AI models are pitted against each other in tests.

Mr. Musk added that the company will continue to improve the model.

Last month, DeepSeek released its R1 AI model, which is on par with or even outperforming popular AI models like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, Microsoft's CoPilot, and Meta's Llama.

What makes DeepSeek most surprising is that this AI model "only costs 5.6 million USD" to build and operate, while US technology companies are spending hundreds, even billions of USD to develop and operate their own AI models.

Another point that makes DeepSeek attract the attention of the technology world is that this AI tool was born and developed at a time when the US government was applying sanctions, preventing the supply of high-performance AI chips to Chinese companies.

That means DeepSeek was developed and runs on a low-performance AI chip, but still shows impressive power.

Micah Soto

Update 19 February 2025