Agencies
US billionaire Elon Musk's artificial intelligence startup xAI showed off the updated Grok-3 model, showcasing a version of the chatbot technology that the billionaire has said is the "smartest AI on Earth."
Across math, science and coding benchmarks, Grok-3 beats Alphabet's Google Gemini, DeepSeek's V3 model, Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's GPT-4o, the company said via a live stream on Monday.
Grok-3 has "more than 10 times" the compute power of its predecessor and completed pre-training in early January, Musk said in a presentation alongside three of xAI's engineers.
"We're continually improving the models every day, and literally within 24 hours, you'll see improvements," he said.
The company introduced a new smart search engine with Grok-3, calling it DeepSearch.
DeepSearch is a reasoning chatbot that expresses its process of understanding a query and how it plans its response. It includes options for research, brainstorming and data analysis, the demonstration showed.
Musk's team also said it intends to release a voice-based chatbot "as soon as possible."
Grok-3 is rolling out to Premium+ subscribers on X immediately. The company is starting a new subscription called SuperGrok for the bot's mobile app and Grok.com website. xAI plans to open-source preceding versions of its Grok models as soon as the latest one is fully mature, with Musk saying he expects that transition to be complete for Grok-3 in a few months.
Musk's performance claims, which have not been independently verified, ramp up an increasingly bitter rivalry between his startup and OpenAI. He launched xAI in 2023 as an alternative to the ChatGPT maker, which he's publicly criticized for its plans to restructure as a for-profit business.
OpenAI is considering granting special voting rights to its non-profit board to preserve the power of its directors, as the ChatGPT-maker fends off an unsolicited takeover bid from Musk, the Financial Times reported yesterday.
Chief executive Sam Altman and board members are evaluating new governance measures as the company transitions to a traditional for-profit structure, the report said.
While no firm decisions have been made, the move could help OpenAI block future hostile takeover attempts, including from Musk, who co-founded the company with Altman but later departed.
In other news, Tiger Brokers said it embedded DeepSeek's model into its AI-powered chatbot, as brokerages and money managers race to capitalise on the Chinese start-up's artificial intelligence breakthrough and develop uses for the financial industry.
Elon Musk
xAI says Grok beats its rivals across math, science and coding benchmarks.
REUTERS
