Elon Musk has debuted a new version of his artificial intelligence chatbot, called Grok 3, days after rival OpenAI rejected the billionaire’s bid for the company, which he cofounded with Sam Altman and others in 2015.
Musk’s startup, xAI, claimed in a livestream announcement on Musk-owned social media platform X that Grok 3 is superior to competitors including OpenAI’s GPT-4o, Alphabet’s Google Gemini, DeepSeek‘s V3 model and Anthropic’s Claude.
With its latest AI chatbot, xAI’s mission according to Musk, is to “understand the universe,” including by answering questions such as, “Where are the aliens?” “How does the universe end?” and “How did it start?”
Grok 3 surpasses the computer power of its previous iteration, Grok 2 by more than 10 times, xAI engineers said in an hour-long, livestreamed presentation on X.
The company’s claims about the AI’s computing power and capabilities across categories such as mathematical reasoning, science and coding have not been independently verified.
During the X livestream, xAI demoed Grok 3, asking the chatbot to plot a launch from earth to planet Mars, and back to earth at a future launch date. Musk and his engineers also asked it to create a game that is a hybrid between Tetris and Bejeweled, and to “make it insanely great.”
The company noted that Grok 3 is learning every day, and that users can expect to see improvements in the AI every 24 hours.
Andrej Karpathy, former director of AI at Tesla and a member of OpenAI’s founding team, gave Grok 3 a “quick vibe check,” posting a review of the tool on X.
He praised its “state-of-the-art thinking model,” which he said is as good as OpenAI’s and superior to DeepSeek’s, Gemini’s and Claude’s.
He critiqued Grok 3 “sense of humor” though, and called it “overly sensitive” to ethical issues.
How much does it cost?
Premium+ X subscribers, who pay $22 a month for the service, can currently access the tool.
By contrast, OpenAI’s GPT-4o costs $200 a month.
Musk launched xAI in 2023 to compete with OpenAI, which he left in 2018 and has since criticized over its plans to restructure as a for-profit company. OpenAI last week unanimously rejected a $97.4 million takeover bid from Musk for the AI firm.
“OpenAI is not for sale, and the board has unanimously rejected Mr. Musk’s latest attempt to disrupt his competition,” OpenAI chairman Bret Taylor said on X. “Any potential reorganization of OpenAI will strengthen our nonprofit and its mission to ensure AGI [artificial general intelligence] benefits all of humanity.”
Megan Cerullo is a New York-based reporter for CBS MoneyWatch covering small business, workplace, health care, consumer spending and personal finance topics. She regularly appears on CBS News 24/7 to discuss her reporting.
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