By Kimberley Kao

Elon Musk's artificial-intelligence startup, xAI, has unveiled its latest AI model, Grok 3, claiming it outperforms DeepSeek and OpenAI models across various benchmarks.

Musk said the latest version has more than 10 times the computing power of its previous version, speaking in a livestream on Monday, alongside three members of xAI's engineering team. Grok 3 completed its pre-training in early January, they added.

Citing its own comparisons using math, science and coding benchmarks, xAI claimed Grok 3's outperforms Google's Gemini 2.0 Pro, DeepSeek's V3 model, Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet and OpenAI's GPT-4o.

"We should emphasize that this is kind of a beta-like, meaning that you should expect some imperfections at first, but we will improve it rapidly, almost every day," Musk said.

The xAI team added that it built its own data "to build the best AI out there," utilizing 200,000 graphics processing units.

The company first launched its stand-alone consumer chatbot, Grok, in January, which shares its name with the AI language model.

Musk added that a voice function to interact with the chatbot is "about a week away" from being publicly released.

In addition, xAI introduced a new search engine product called DeepSearch, which it described it as the "first generation of our Grok agents."

A demonstration showed a chatbot-like interface that can conduct extensive research, analyze data and assist with coding. DeepSearch can also explain its reasoning process, providing insight into how it answers questions and plans responses.

Grok 3 features and the DeepSearch function will be first available to Premium+ subscribers on the social media platform X, with a broader rollout planned in the coming days.

It also introduced a new subscription plan called SuperGrok for its mobile app and website, offering subscribers access to the latest Grok features and updates.

The latest announcement comes amid a frenzy triggered by Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, after launching its open-source AI model, R1. DeepSeek claims the model excels at problem solving, rivaling OpenAI's GPT-4o reasoning model and most notably, at a fraction of the cost per use.

This has raised concerns over the demand for advanced chips and data centers, while also boosting optimism in China's AI sector. In recent weeks, Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba released its upgraded AI model, while tech giant Baidu said it will make its AI chatbot available to use free-of-charge, adding to the growing competition.

Write to Kimberley Kao at kimberley.kao@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

February 18, 2025 03:52 ET (08:52 GMT)

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