Credit: VentureBeat made with Midjourney Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI has unveiled Grok 3, its latest AI model that the company claims outperforms leading competitors across key technical benchmarks. The announcement marks a significant escalation in the race to develop more powerful AI systems. The launch comes just days after Musk’s failed $97.4 billion bid to acquire OpenAI, the company he co-founded with Sam Altman in 2015. During a livestreamed demonstration on X, Musk characterized Grok 3 as “an order of magnitude more capable than Grok 2” and emphasized its ability to reason through complex problems. Early testing appears to support some of xAI’s claims. The model topped the influential Chatbot Arena leaderboard, scoring higher than OpenAI’s GPT-4o, Google’s Gemini and DeepSeek’s V3 model in blind user testing. Published benchmarks show Grok 3 achieving superior scores in mathematics (AIME ’24), scientific reasoning (GPQA) and coding tasks. Grok 3 leads the Chatbot Arena leaderboard with a score of approximately 1400, significantly outperforming other major AI models in blind user testing. (Source: xAI) Inside Grok 3’s massive computing infrastructure: 200,000 GPUs and a new data center “Grok 3 clearly has around state of the art thinking capabilities,” wrote former OpenAI researcher Andrej Karpathy in an X post after early-access testing. “Few models get this right reliably. The top OpenAI thinking models get it too, but all of DeepSeek-R1, Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking, and Claude do not.” The model’s development required massive computational resources. xAI doubled its GPU cluster to 200,000 Nvidia chips for training, housed in a new Memphis data center. This infrastructure investment highlights the increasing computational demands of advanced AI development, as companies race to build more capable systems. I was given early access to Grok 3 earlier today, making me I think one of the first few who could run a quick vibe check. Thinking ✅ First, Grok 3 clearly has an around state of the art thinking model ("Think" button) and did great out of the box on my Settler's of Catan… pic.twitter.com/qIrUAN1IfD