‘Scary smart’ Grok 3 goes live today – What you need to know

Although we weren’t supposed to see it for at least another one to two weeks, the new Grok AI chatbot model by xAI, called Grok 3, or the “smartest AI on Earth,” as Elon Musk called it, is now only hours away, and there are some things you should know before it launches.

As it happens, Musk, who earlier last week indicated Grok 3 was nearing completion and would be ready within weeks, took to his social media platform to announce that the live demonstration will take place earlier – on “Monday night at 8pm PT [Pacific time],” as he explained in an X post on February 16.

This translates to Tuesday, 09:30 AM IST or 04:00 AM GMT. The chatbot, developed using xAI’s Colossus supercomputer, which took eight months to build and received its training using 100,000 Nvidia GPU hours, will be available on X.com.

It’s supposed to be three times faster than its predecessor, Grok 2, which was launched in August 2024. It includes synthetic datasets, self-correction mechanisms, and reinforcement learning, with an aim to reduce errors or “hallucinations,” while improving accuracy and training efficacy.

Furthermore, after the world’s richest person and a top advisor to President Donald Trump, said in the comments that he would be “honing product with the team all weekend,” and was hence going to be offline, the Tesla CEO checked in once again on February 17 to add that “It’s looking good!”

Reacting to Musk’s most recent announcement, the Grok (GROK) cryptocurrency soared 54% in price, reaching $0.005796 before consolidating at $0.004931 at press time. Its market cap currently stands at around $32 million. 

Grok 3 vs. ChatGPT

Last week, speaking by video link at the World Government Summit in Dubai, Musk praised Grok 3 as “scary smart,” stating the bot has been able to come up with “not obvious solutions” that people would not expect. As he said, hinting at a challenge to the domination of Google’s DeepMind Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT:

“We think it’ll be better than anything else, and then maybe this might be the last time that any AI is better than Grok.”

As a reminder, Musk co-founded OpenAI with its CEO Sam Altman in 2015, but broke away from the company in 2018 and founded the competing AI startup xAI in 2023. Since his breakaway, they have been at the opposite camps in a legal battle over OpenAI’s future.

The things between the two became all the more interesting after a group of investors led by Musk recently made an unsolicited $97.4 billion bid to take control of OpenAI – which Altman emphatically declined and offered a counter-offer to buy X (which Musk purchased for $44 billion in 2022).

In response, Musk shared a video of Altman’s 2023 testimony before Congress in which he said he had “no equity in OpenAI,” captioning it with “Scam Altman.”

Meanwhile, Chinese startup DeepSeek broke into the global AI industry with a bang, launching its low-cost, high-quality chatbot, creating a major obstacle to US ambitions in the AI development efforts. 

Therefore, Grok 3 has quite a bit of competition to overcome from existing market leaders if it wants to position itself as a powerful player.