After a missed release deadline in 2024, xAI’s Grok 3 is finally here. If you’re wondering what that means, then you may just need to familiarize yourself with Elon Musk’s AI chatbot a little more. On Thursday, Musk revealed that the Grok 3 release date was set for sometime in the next week or two as the bot was in its final phases, however, on Monday, February 17, we saw another Grok 3 release update stating that the advanced chatbot was finally ready to debut.

According to the CEO, who spoke at the World Governments Summit in Dubai, Grok 3 has crossed all of its benchmarks to outperform “anything that’s been released.” It appears the AI competition in 2025 is heating up although we’re only two months into the new year. 

If you’re interested in the future of AI, then you’ll want to know more about Grok 3’s features and if it can really hold its own against current competition. 

Grok 3 release date

The AI competition if 2025 is already growing, with the xAI Grok 3 release marking a turning point for Elon Musk’s AI chatbot.

xAI’s Grok 3 Gets A Release—Wait, What is Grok 3?

In March 2023, xAI was founded by Musk to “advance our collective understanding of the universe.” In common terms, it was an artificial intelligence company that was on the path to releasing its own AI tool to compete with the likes of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. 

By November 2023, the company announced the early-access release of an AI chatbot, Grok 1. The name Grok is inspired by Robert A. Heinlein’s novel, Stranger in a Strange Land, and is said to mean “fully and profoundly understand something.” The Grok AI immediately gained the reputation of being a less censored and more opinionated version of other AIs, and this has proven to be true over time.

In December, premium-paying users on Twitter/X, Musk’s other acquisition, were able to begin conversing with the tool and exploring its capabilities. After multiple upgrades to Grok’s performance in the next few months, Grok-2 was released in August 2024, giving users access to its “state-of-the-art reasoning capabilities.” 

By the time we arrived in December 2024, all users, both paying and non-paying ones on Twitter/X, were able to use the latest model. We’re now in 2025, and the xAI Grok 3 release date on February 17 was celebrated with a Grok 3 launch broadcast on the X platform.

Grok 3 features

Image: xAI’s Grok 3 emerged from the incomprehensible progress it has made with its data centers. 

What is Grok 3?

“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 during the Grok 3 release update that he participated in with other members of the xAI team. Grok 3 is the latest version of the AI LLM models that the company has been working on, reportedly developed with 10x more computing power than Grok 2. 

The AI was repeatedly trained by relying on over 200,000 GPUs in the Colossus Supercluster Memphis data center, which is a significant achievement. While Grok 3 primarily functions as a chatbot and uses natural language to understand and interact with users, the team behind the AI has a much loftier understanding of the nature of the universe and all that it contains within. 

Musk and xAI’s Grok 3 includes multiple models, including the Grok 3 mini, which works faster but doesn’t engage as much of its thinking capabilities. The advanced model has “reasoning” capabilities that allow it to logically test its response and fact-check what it is putting out, similar to ChatGPT’s o3-mini-high. While xAI’s Grok 3 has begun to roll out, it is not fully available to all users with all of its features.

Who Can Use xAI’s Grok 3?

Like previous versions of the Grok 3 model, the AI is currently only available to X Premium Plus subscribers. It is possible that the company will eventually roll out access to other users as well when the model has been tested out more, but for now, to access its advanced capabilities and see how it stacks up in the AI competition in 2025, you will have to get a subscription. There is also a SuperGrok plan that will require a subscription to access some more reasoning capabilities and unlimited image generation. 

The AI is also expected to receive a voice mode in the coming weeks and the Grok 3 models will also become accessible through xAI’s enterprise API. Once Grok 3 is fully stabilized and fully out, Grok 2 will become open-source for those who want to investigate its structure and capabilities in depth.

How Powerful Is Grok 3?

According to the xAI Grok 3 live stream update, the LLM developed by the team greatly outperforms many of its competitors. Grok 3 benchmarks tests in general mathematical reasoning (AIME), general knowledge about STEM and science (GPQA), and coding, reportedly showed that both Grok 3 and Grok 3 mini outperformed Gemini 2 Pro, Deepseek V3, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and even GPT 4o. 

An early version of Grok 3 was even able to hold its own against its competitors in the Chatbot Arena, where users get to blind react to responses from different AIs to select their preferred response. 

Grok 3’s benchmark tests show that there is room for scaling up the model even further in the coming weeks. During the showcase, Musk explained that the model is “improving every day,” and the team appears to be actively working on refining and testing the model even now. 

Elon Musk AI chatbot

Image: xAI Grok 3’s performance during benchmark tests showcased during the stream.

Grok 3 Features—What’s So Special About the AI?

Elon Musk’s AI chatbot does what every other chatbot does, reply to user queries, but since its inception, the tool has been known for being particularly unfiltered, although it’s still far from being politically neutral. The AI does not censor or regulate itself the way other LLM models are trained to do, and Musk prides himself on ensuring the AI is funny. 

On a more serious note, xAI’s Grok 3 features advanced “thinking” and “big brain” capabilities that allow the AI to reason out its own responses and provide more comprehensive answers. Some of the thinking is obfuscated to prevent it from being copied by other competitors. Grok is smart enough to write games or combine existing ones to showcase how far it can reason. 

These thinking and reasoning capabilities are not exclusive to AI as ChatGPT and Gemini have already showcased such abilities, but it is still impressive that xAI has been able to elevate Grok 3 to this point in such a short time. 

Musk vs OpenAI, What Is Going On with the AI Competition in 2025?

Until now, OpenAI has been operating as a nonprofit operation but the company is now looking to switch to a for-profit business to secure more capital from investors and other interested parties that want to participate in the success of the organization. Elon Musk is strictly opposed to the growth of its competitor, a company that he had initially had a hand in establishing years ago.

Musk even went so far as to sue OpenAI CEO Sam Altman last year in an attempt to block the company’s transition into a for-profit business, but he has also joined other investors in a bid to buy OpenAI’s assets, with a $97.4 billion offer on the table. Altman rejected the bid and pointed out Musk’s attempt to destabilize the company with these tactics, but it’s unclear how far he will be able to prevent Musk’s economic and political influence from affecting the company.

The arrival of China-based Deepseek AI has also caused considerable disruption in the AI industry, but the general attitude towards AI is now turning critical instead. We’ll have to wait and see whether Deepseek continues to be a major player in the AI conversation in the coming days. xAI’s Grok 3 appears to be doing well enough for itself as of now, although the AI’s reach is not nearly as widespread as other popular AI tools.

What Do Users Think About Musk and xAI’s Grok AI?

For the most part, users appear to be waiting impatiently to gain access to xAI’s Grok 3. Those who have gained access have begun running their own tests. Some appear impressed with its capabilities while others have been disappointed by the results so far. 

Considering Grok 3’s recent release date, it might be a few more weeks before we see the full scale of Grok 3’s features and capabilities so we recommend being patient for now. The Grok 3 benchmark updates only give us a part of the picture, but we’ll know more about how powerful Grok 3 is once more testers and reviewers employ it for complex tasks that require a more advanced reasoning ability.

Apart from the AI chatbot, xAI also revealed that it was launching an AI gaming studio, so if you’re interested, consider turning your attention there instead. 

 

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tagged in AI competition 2025, Elon Musk AI chatbot, Grok 3 benchmarks, Grok 3 features, Grok 3 release date, Grok 3 release update, How powerful is Grok 3, xAI Grok 3
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