The AI rivalry between OpenAI and xAI has intensified with the release of Grok 3, the latest model from Elon Musk’s AI startup, xAI. Musk claims Grok 3 is “an order of magnitude more capable than Grok 2.”
Barely weeks after DeepSeek’s revolutionary reveal and days after OpenAI announced plans to launch GPT-4.5 and GPT-5, xAI introduced an early version of Grok 3, dubbed ‘Chocolate,’ which quickly secured the top position on the lmarena (formerly LMSYS) Chatbot Arena leaderboard, a widely recognized AI benchmarking platform.
Beyond Grok 3, xAI is also challenging OpenAI’s advancements in search with the launch of its own AI-powered search tool, Deep Search.
Grok 3 will be available to premium X subscribers in the U.S. and can also be accessed via a separate subscription for its web and app versions. The model was trained on xAI’s Colossus supercomputer cluster in Memphis, Tennessee, which currently operates 100,000 Nvidia GPUs. xAI plans to expand this capacity to potentially one million GPUs.
Musk has described Grok 3 as the “smartest” AI model on the planet and stated that, “if all goes well,” it will be integrated into SpaceX Starship rockets heading to Mars within two years.
Grok 3 (Chocolate) has set a historic milestone, becoming the first AI model to achieve a score of 1,400. In comparison, OpenAI’s GPT-4 and o1 models scored 1,377 and 1,353, respectively, while Google’s Gemini 2.0 Flash, the previous leader, held a score of 1,385.
In response to Grok 3’s performance, Musk said:
“All you need to know to understand which company will win a technology competition is look at the first and second derivatives of the rate of innovation.”
Initially expected to launch in December 2024, Grok 3 was anticipated to rival or even exceed the capabilities of OpenAI’s GPT-5. Musk revealed that the model was trained on extensive data, including court cases and legal doctrines, enabling it to “render extremely compelling legal verdicts.”
During the livestream reveal, Musk said:
“Grok 3 is an order of magnitude more capable than Grok 2,” adding that the model is designed to be a “maximally truth-seeking AI, even if that truth is sometimes at odds with what is politically correct.”
Musk, one of OpenAI’s original co-founders, has been positioning xAI aggressively as a competitor after parting ways with OpenAI over concerns about its shift toward a for-profit model. He is currently leading a consortium attempting to acquire OpenAI with an initial offer of $97.4 billion that was rejected. His legal team has stated they are prepared to match any competing bid.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has confirmed that the next release will be GPT-4.5, with an early version called ‘Orion’ already in internal testing. OpenAI is also working to integrate its o-series and GPT-series models into a unified system for more efficient decision-making and problem-solving.
