Elon Musk launches Grok 3
Starting the demo, Elon Musk explained what the meaning of Grok is. He said, “The term comes from Robert Heinlein’s novel Stranger in a Strange Land. It’s used by a character raised on Mars and means to fully and profoundly understand something. The word ‘grok’ conveys deep understanding, and empathy is an important part of that.”
In April 2024, Elon Musk determined that for xAI to build the most advanced AI, the company needed to create its own data center, the team explained. They stated that with the goal of launching Grok 3 as quickly as possible, the team had to work within an extremely tight timeline, giving them just about four months to complete the project. “It took us 122 days to get the first 100,000 GPUs up and running, which was a monumental effort. We believe it’s the largest fully connected H1 100 cluster of its kind. But we didn’t stop there,” the team said.
They added, “We quickly recognised that to build the AI we envision, we needed to double the size of the cluster. So, we initiated another phase—this is the first time we’re talking about this publicly—where we doubled the capacity in just 92 days. We’ve used all this computing power to continuously improve the product along the way.”
The team explained that the Grok 3 is designed to function in three ways: DeepSearch, Think and Big mind. Let’s look at each of these in detail.
Grok 3: Think
In the demo, the first thing the team made Grok 3 do, is to solve a physics problem. They asked the model to plot a viable trajectory for a transfer from Earth to Mars and, later, a transfer back to Earth. They said, “This involves some complex physics that Grok will need to understand. We’ll challenge it to come up with a viable trajectory, calculate it, and then plot it for us so we can visualise it.”
The AI model took 114 seconds of thinking to answer the question. Here, as the model thinks before concluding the answer, you can see the process followed by the model to get to the bottom of the problem. During the demo, the team also said that since the demo is unscripted, the model can make mistakes and conclude a wrong answer. However, there were no mistakes, at least for this demo.
Grok 3: Big Brain
Grok 3’s Big Brain uses its creative ability to conduct a task. In the demo, the team asked the AI model to create a new game combining two well-known games: The Tetris and Bejeweled.
As Grok 3 was thinking and working on the query, Elon Musk said, “Grok is the beginning of creativity.” As the AI model successfully created the game, he added, “We’re launching an AI gaming studio at xAI. If you’re interested in joining us and developing AI-driven games, please come aboard. We’re announcing the launch tonight.”
Grok 3: DeepSearch
The Grok 3 model has been taught to solve complex problems, including Math, Science and Coding. The xAI team shared that now with the DeepSearch option, users can ask Grok to perform in-depth research on their behalf. While in-depth research is now offered by most of the AI models, like DeepSeek R1, Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking, the team suggests that users can ask Grok 3 to think longer beforeconcluding a query. This means that the Grok 3 can think even harder, when asked, to deliver even better results.
The launch of Grok 3 marks a pivotal moment for xAI as competition in the AI industry intensifies. The company is not only contending with Western tech giants like OpenAI and Google but also facing growing pressure from emerging Chinese firms such as DeepSeek. DeepSeek’s rapid advancements have pushed competitors to adjust their strategies, OpenAI, for example, recently made its first reasoning model available for free and soon after introduced Deep Research AI.