SAN FRANCISCO: Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company unveiled on Monday (Feb 17) the latest version of its chatbot, Grok 3, which the billionaire hopes will find traction in a highly competitive sector contested by the likes of ChatGPT and China’s DeepSeek.
The launch comes as the world’s richest man is deploying the enormous powers granted him by US President Donald Trump to restructure and dismantle federal agencies.
The unprecedented cost-cutting drive has raised conflict-of-interest questions, given that many of those agencies have regulatory oversight on elements of Musk’s sprawling business empire.
“Grok is to understand the universe,” Musk said at the start of the Grok 3 launch presentation.
“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 has promoted Grok 3 as “scary smart,” with 10 times the computational resources of its predecessor that was released in August last year.
The flagship product of his xAI company was trained on synthetic data and employs self-correction mechanisms that avoid errors – known as “hallucinations” – that plague some AI chatbots and lead them to process false or misleading data as fact.
“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 said in a video call last week with the World Governments Summit in Dubai.
Grok 3 will be made available first to Premium+ paid subscribers of X – formerly Twitter, which Musk acquired in 2022 – before rolling out to other users.
The upgraded chatbot enters a crowded field with countries racing to introduce more sophisticated – and cost-effective – AI products.
Chinese startup DeepSeek shocked the global AI industry last month with the launch of its low-cost, high-quality R1 chatbot – a direct challenge to US ambitions to lead the world in developing the technology.
