SAN FRANCISCO—Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company unveiled Monday the latest version of its chatbot, Grok 3, which the billionaire hopes will find traction in a highly competitive sector contested by the likes of ChatGPT and China’s DeepSeek.
The unprecedented cost-cutting drive has raised conflict-of-interest questions, given that many of those agencies have regulatory oversight on elements of Musk’s sprawling business empire.
Musk has promoted Grok 3 as “scary smart,” with 10 times the computational resources of its predecessor that was released in August last year.
The flagship product of his xAI company was trained on synthetic data and employs self-correction mechanisms that avoid errors—known as “hallucinations”—that plague some AI chatbots and lead them to process false or misleading data as fact.
“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,” Musk said in a video call last week with the World Governments Summit in Dubai according to Reuters.
The upgraded chatbot enters a crowded field with countries racing to introduce more sophisticated—and cost-effective—AI products.
Chinese startup DeepSeek shocked the global AI industry last month with the launch of its low-cost, high-quality R1 chatbot—a direct challenge to US ambitions to lead the world in developing the technology.
Grok 3 is also going up against OpenAI’s chatbot, ChatGPT – pitting Musk against collaborator-turned-arch rival Sam Altman.
Musk and Altman were among the 11-person team that founded OpenAI in 2015. Created as a counterweight to Google’s dominance in artificial intelligence, the project got its initial funding from Musk, who invested $45 million to get it started.
