Grok 3 launch: First reactions pour in for the 'smartest AI on earth'

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence (AI) company xAI released its much-anticipated flagship model Grok 3 on Tuesday, showing off new capabilities for the Grok iOS and web applications.

Early users flooded the internet with reviews of the new offering, which claims to be the "smartest AI on the planet", a tall claim in a hyper-competitive fight just recently joined by China.



Andrej Karpathy, chief executive at Eureka Labs and former director of AI at Tesla, was given early access to Grok 3, after which he noted that Grok 3’s "Thinking" features are near state-of-the-art.


"The impression overall I got here is that this is somewhere around o1-pro capability, and ahead of DeepSeek-R1, though of course, we need actual, real evaluations to look at," he said in a detailed post on X.

Alexandr Wang, CEO of Scale AI, congratulated Musk and the xAI team. "Grok 3 is a new, best model in the world from the @xai team! Grok 3 ranks #1 on Chatbot Arena w/a big gap, and scores impressively on pretraining and reasoning evals," he said.



American computer scientist Lex Fridman, who also hosts a tech podcast, said "his mind was blown” after using Grok 3. “I got to use Grok 3 extensively (early). My mind is blown, very impressive model. Congrats to Elon and the team for bringing it to life,” he wrote on X.


Musk, in a live stream presentation with xAI engineers, claimed that Grok 3 has “more than 10 times” the compute power of its predecessor Grok 2.

Musk claimed that Grok 3 outperforms Alphabet Inc.'s Google Gemini, DeepSeek's V3 model, Anthropic's Claude, and OpenAI's GPT-4o across mathematics, science, and coding benchmarks.

Initially, access to this advanced AI will be exclusive to Premium Plus subscribers on the X platform, with a new subscription tier, "Super Grok," providing enthusiasts with early and comprehensive access to its features.