The most recent iteration of Elon Musk’s chatbot, Grok 3, was presented on Monday by his artificial intelligence business xAI. The billionaire hopes the chatbot will gain popularity in a highly competitive field that is fought by companies like China’s DeepSeek and OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
The launch occurs as the wealthiest man in the world is using the vast authority that U.S. President Donald Trump has given him to reorganize and abolish federal agencies.
Since many of those agencies have regulatory control over parts of Musk’s vast corporate empire, the unusual cost-cutting campaign has sparked concerns about conflicts of interest.
Musk stated at the beginning of the Grok 3 launch event, “Grok is to understand the universe.”
“We’re driven by curiosity about the nature of the universe – that’s also what causes us to be a maximally truth-seeking AI, even if that truth is sometimes at odds with what is politically correct.”
Musk marketed Grok 3 as “scary smart,” claiming that it has ten times the processing power of its predecessor, which came out in August of last year.
His xAI company’s flagship product was trained on synthetic data and uses self-correction techniques to prevent “hallucinations,” which are faults that cause some AI chatbots to interpret inaccurate or deceptive data with certainty.
“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,” Musk stated during a video conference in Dubai last week with the World Governments Summit.
Grok 3 will be released to all users after first being made available to X Premium+ premium subscribers. X was originally Twitter, which Musk purchased in 2022.
With nations vying to launch increasingly advanced and affordable AI solutions, the enhanced chatbot joins a crowded market.
With the release of its affordable, high-quality R1 chatbot last month, Chinese firm DeepSeek stunned the worldwide AI community and directly challenged American aspirations to be the world’s leader in the field.
Additionally, Musk will go off against Sam Altman, a former partner who is now an arch foe, in Grok 3 versus OpenAI’s chatbot, ChatGPT.
In 2015, an 11-person team led by Musk and Altman created OpenAI. Musk provided $45 million to launch the project, which was intended to serve as a counterbalance to Google’s hegemony in artificial intelligence.
Three years after Musk’s departure, OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT in 2022 sparked a worldwide technological revolution that made Altman a household name without Musk at its core.
Trump and tech
Trump has prioritized technology in his new government. At his inauguration, tech millionaires were highlighted, and he launched a number of significant AI infrastructure projects from the White House.
As the head of the recently established Department of federal Efficiency (DOGE), which has started a drastic makeover of the U.S. federal bureaucracy, and one of Trump’s closest advisors, Musk has emerged as a pivotal figure in the administration.
Since Musk advises Trump on laws and regulations pertaining to artificial intelligence, a field in which he has a large financial interest, critics caution that his close relationship with the president presents a serious conflict of interest.
According to Bloomberg, xAI has been reaching out to possible investors in hopes of raising about $10 billion, which would put the company’s worth at over $75 billion.
Shortly after he signed an open letter advocating for a halt to the development of powerful AI models, Musk, who also serves as the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, founded the xAI company in July 2023.