Elon Musk unveils Grok 3 and ‘Deep Search’ tool

Elon Musk took time away from infiltrating the White House on Tuesday to launch the latest edition of xAI’s artificial intelligence chatbot, Grok 3.

The tech billionaire and “special government employee” unveiled his AI company’s latest model during a demo livestreamed on Musk-owned X.

Musk was joined by xAI co-founders Jimmy Ba and Yuhuai “Tony” Wu, and lead engineer Igor Babuschkin, who all went into detail about Grok 3’s advanced reasoning, speed, and increased training.

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“We’re very excited to present Grok 3, which is, we think, an order of magnitude more capable than Grok 2 in a very short period of time,” Musk said. “Our team’s been working extremely hard over the last few months to improve Grok as much as we can, so we can give all of you access to it.”

The new model, which follows Grok-2, is now available for all paying subscribers with a Premium+ X account.

In the demo, Ba said xAI said Grok 3 had been tested under the codename “chocolate” on the LMSYS leaderboard— a system for testing large language models (LLMs) — and claimed even early versions of Grok 3 were outperforming rivals like Gemini-2 Pro, DeepSeek-V3, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and GPT-4o.

The third iteration of Grok comes after the release of a standalone iOS app for the chatbot in January.

Grok launched in December 2023 after Musk launched xAI in July 2023. The AI chatbot hasn’t been without controversy, including the generation of fake headlines promoted on X’s Explore trending news section.

What Grok 3 can do

To demonstrate Grok 3’s reasoning capabilities in physics, Babuschkin asked the AI chatbot to “generate code for an animated 3d plot of a launch from earth landing on mars and then back to earth at the next launch window.” You can watch the “unscripted” result around 30 minutes into the video above.

The team also had Grok 3 write code to fuse Tetris and Bejeweled into a new game that works on its own, which Musk praised as “the beginning of creativity.” 

During the demo, Ba also announced that X was adding a new “Deep Search” tool as a “next generation search engine” powered by Grok. The product, he said, is one that “not just helps the engineers and research and scientists to do coding, but actually helps everyone answer questions that you have day to day.”

Credit: Mashable screenshot: xAI

Ba searched “when is the next Starship launch?” using Deep Search, to which it generated the answer Feb. 24 — notably, Wikipedia was one of the first sources it used. “It might be sooner,” Musk commentated.