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Introduction
Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company unveiled on Monday 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.
Grok 3 Features
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.
Competition in the AI Industry
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. Grok 3 is also going up against OpenAI's chatbot, ChatGPT – pitting Musk against collaborator-turned-arch rival Sam Altman.
Musk's Involvement in the Tech Industry
Musk and Altman were among the 11-person team that founded OpenAI in 2015. Created as a counterweight to Google's dominance in artificial intelligence, the project got its initial funding from Musk, who invested $45 million to get it started.
Musk left three years later, and then in 2022 OpenAI's release of ChatGPT created a global technology sensation -- one that did not feature Musk at its center and which made Altman a star. Their relationship has become increasingly toxic and litigious ever since, with Open AI's board last week rejecting a Musk-led offer to buy out the company for close to $100 billion.
Conclusion
According to Bloomberg, xAI has been canvassing potential investors for a roughly $10 billion funding round that would value the company at about $75 billion. Musk, who also acts as boss of SpaceX and Tesla, launched the xAI company in July 2023, shortly after he signed an open letter calling for a pause in the development of powerful AI models.
