Elon Musk’s OpenAI-competitor AI company xAI has made its latest Grok LLM model, Grok 3, free for anybody and everybody who wants a taste of the “smartest AI on earth.” What’s impressive is that free access to Grok 3 is rolling out barely a few hours after its global unveiling. Another impressive feat is that Grok 3 has DeepSearch and reasoning abilities, right out of the gate. Paying customers of course will get “more”, including a voice mode, which has been kept on hold for now but confirmed to launch sometime in the coming weeks.
So, what is Grok 3? The TL;DR version to describe it is that it is the brains behind Grok, an AI chatbot, from xAI that may be considered as its answer to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and DeepSeek R1. The third-generation Grok LLM is a sequel to Grok 2 from August 2024. xAI claims it is “an order of magnitude more capable” than Grok 2. Elon Musk and his team at xAI in fact say we might be on the cusp of seeing “the beginnings of creativity” basis of internal testing data for which they are using reinforcement learning technique.
“This is it: The world’s smartest AI, Grok 3, now available for free (until our servers melt),” xAI wrote on X, the platform previously known as Twitter. “X Premium+ and SuperGrok users will have increased access to Grok 3, in addition to early access to advanced features like Voice Mode.”
The easiest way to access and use Grok 3 is through the X app itself and X website on the web. Dedicated versions for Windows and Mac are in the works and coming soon. Across the Android, iOS apps and web, you’ll find the Grok toggle as one of your options, which is the entry-point. Once you’re in, Grok 3 is up and running to answer your queries. Two new features are its key USP. One is DeepSearch which allows you to “search deeply to deliver detailed, well-reasoned answers with Grok’s rapid, agentic search.” The other is “Think” which lets you “solve the hardest problems in math, science, and coding.”
Since the reasoning model is in beta, xAI warns against imperfections but a more polished version is expected to launch within a week.
