Grok 3 launches today as Elon Musk's ‘scary good’ AI chatbot looks set to take on ChatGPT

(Image credit: lilgrapher / Shutterstock)

Grok 3 is being released at 8.00pm PT
It will have improved reasoning computational power and adaptability
Musk says it will be more reliable

People may be ditching X for Bluesky at record levels, but Elon Musk’s attempt to turn X into a serious AI platform is still going strong with the release of a new Grok version 3.

According to Reuters, Grok 3 is due to be released at 8.00pm Pacific Time today. In a call addressing the World Governments Summit in Dubai last week Musk described Grok 3 as “scary smart”, saying it represented a major step forward over Grok 2 with improved reasoning, computational power and adaptability.

Hinting that his latest chatbot can now compete with ChatGPT and DeepSeek, Musk continued: "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”.

Fewer hallucinations

In the call Musk also talked about Grok 3’s ability to reduce the curse of AI chatbots, the errors that creep into AI – often called 'hallucinations' – by going back and forth through the data and tries to achieve logical consistency, so if it has wrong data that doesn’t fit reality, it will reflect on it and remove the error.

He also revealed that Grok 3 has been trained using more computational power than any other Grok model so far, and that a lot of synthetic data has been used in the training process.

There’s no news yet on Grok’s most controversial feature, its image generation capability, and how this will be improved or enhanced in Grok 3. xAI offers some of the best photorealistic image rendering around thanks to its use of the Flux AI model, and in December announced that it was using a new model Auroria image model.

In a statement xAI said: “Aurora is an autoregressive mixture-of-experts network trained to predict the next token from interleaved text and image data. We trained the model on billions of examples from the internet, giving it a deep understanding of the world. As a result, it excels at photorealistic rendering and precisely following text instructions. Beyond text, the model also has native support for multimodal input, allowing it to take inspiration from or directly edit user-provided images.”

Grok differs from other AI image generators because it enables you to create images of celebrities, cartoon superheros and politicians, seemingly without restriction.

Grok can be accessed through Musk’s X social media platform, even on the free tier, but it also has a native app for mobile devices and recently added image analysis to its list of features. Premium and Premium+ users get higher usage limits. It's not currently clear if Grok 3 will initially be available free to all users or just Premium and Premium+ users.