Elon Musk presents Grok 3, X's 'antiwoke' AI

BarcelonaThe race for artificial intelligence has seen a new crucial episode this morning. Elon Musk, the owner of X, activated at around six in the morning the third incarnation of Grok, the AI application associated with this social network. The tycoon had taken advantage of his participation in the world summit of governments held in Dubai to create expectations for this launch: "Grok has very powerful reasoning capabilities. In the tests we have carried out so far it is surpassing everything that has been launched, as far as we are aware, so it is a good sign." In a later tweet he stated that it is "the smartest AI on Earth." And, for the apocalyptic, he left another disturbing message: "It is so intelligent that it is scary."

This launch comes a few days after Musk made a public offer to buy Open AI (driver of ChatGPT, its main rival service) for 97.4 billion dollars. The company's president, Sam Altman, quickly rejected the offer ("No thanks, but we'll buy Twitter for $9.74 billion if you want") in an ironic reference to the fact that, just two years ago, the entrepreneur paid $44 billion to take control of the social network. Musk's offer for Open AI is being interpreted as a maneuver to make it more difficult for Altman to transform what began as a non-profit foundation - with Musk as co-founder - into a commercial company.

Meanwhile, public communication from Grok suggests that the service will have an explicit political bias, predictably leaning in favor of Donald Trump's culture war, and Musk himself, against the left that they disparagingly call the woke. "Grok is designed to answer questions with a bit of wit and has some rebellious outbursts too, so please don't use it if you hate humor." This artificial intelligence tool feeds on content created on X, so its results are expected to mirror the tone of this controversial network. "It will answer sensitive questions that most other AI systems reject," they warn. In a tweet from Elon Musk in which he asks Grok what it thinks of the information, the algorithm responds: "The information, like most traditional media, is garbage."

Beyond Musk's busy style and the products he pushes, the tech community is divided on whether this new AI is really the smartest in the world. The company behind Grok 3, xAI, claims that the tool has been trained with a cluster of 100,000 GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) and that it plans to increase this computing farm to 200,000 processors. This allows it, according to the company's account, to surpass its direct competitors such as GPT-4o, DeepSeek v4 and Gemini 2 Pro in non-reasoning tasks, reaching a score of 1,400 points according to the ELO system, which measures the ability to design strategies. Musk is proud to say that these 100,000 GPUs multiply by 10 the power dedicated to its Artificial Intelligence system and that this has allowed it, in the approved test benches used, to surpass GPT-4o, DeepSeek v4 and Gemini 2 Pro in calculation tasks.

But Grok 3's main strength is not just its power muscle, that is, its ability to operate quickly. The qualitative advance defended by its creators is the adoption of the ability to reason (an aspect that its direct rivals have also already implemented). Of course, these reasoning processes are opaque - unlike the AI of the competition - so the lack of transparency is pointed out as one of the complaints that the new model will receive.

Among the future plans, the will to launch an advanced voice module stands out, along the lines of Omni, from Open AI, which would help a more intuitive interaction with this AI application. And the company has presented its first autonomous agent product, called Deep Search, a bot that allows it to browse the web autonomously and generate detailed reports on content, in the style of what Perplexity does, another of Grok's competitors, created in this case by former Google employees.

For the time being, Grok 3 will only be available to American users who pay for the Premium+ subscription to X, which, after the latest increase, is now $50 a month or $395 a year. There is no date for its arrival in Europe. It should also be noted that Grok 3 also has a model called mini, with fewer features, but which is considered sufficient to offer responses of sufficient quality with an acceptable speed.