Elon Musk launches ‘the smartest AI on earth’

Chatbot Grok-3 is being rolled out for Premium+ subscribers on X

Hyderabad: Elon Musk-owned xAI has launched its AI chatbot Grok-3. The Tesla chief calls it ‘the smartest AI on Earth.’

At the launch event, Musk explained why he chose the name ‘Grok’. “The term comes from Robert Heinlein’s novel Stranger in a Strange Land. It’s used by a character raised on Mars and means to fully and profoundly understand something.”

---

He also stressed that deep understanding and empathy were some of the key aspects of Grok’s capabilities.

xAI shared comparisons with other chatbots, showing Grok-3 outperformed some of the biggest names in the AI industry, including Google’s Gemini 2 Pro, DeepSeek V3, and OpenAI’s GPT-4o, especially in science, coding, and math.

The company claimed that Grok-3 has over 10 times the computing capability of its predecessor. Musk said the AI model completed pre-training in January and is already improving by the day. The chatbot was trained using a massive cluster of 2,00,000 graphics processing units (GPUs) housed in a data centre in Memphis, US.

A smaller version of Grok 3 called Grok 3-mini, which is capable of responding to user’s questions more quickly, was also launched on the occasion.

Musk explained that Grok-3 got another major update, ie DeepSearch. According to him, DeepSearch doesn’t just answer user’s questions but also explains its thought process.

Grok-3 also has other two search engines, namely Think and Big Brain, that work best for analysing physics and mathematical questions.

Grok-3 is being rolled out for Premium+ subscribers on X. One needs to update their X platform to experience the updates. A new subscription plan called SuperGrok will soon be available for users on the Grok mobile app and Grok.com website.

“It really should save you a lot of time. So something that might take you half an hour or an hour of researching on the web or searching social media, you can just ask it to go do that and come back, and 10 minutes later, it’s done an hour’s worth of work for you. That’s really what it comes down to, exactly, and maybe better than you could have done it yourself,” says the SpaceX CEO.