Tech billionaire Elon Musk's artificial intelligence startup xAI will release its latest Grok 3 chatbot on February 17 at 8pm Pacific time. Musk described Grok 3 as "the smartest AI on the planet".
The biggest feature of Grok 3 is the introduction of the "Chain Of Thought" reasoning ability. This capability allows Grok 3 to process complex tasks step by step like human, significantly improving the model's ability to handle complex queries and provide more coherent and logical responses.
The Grok model has been connected to Musk's social media platform X, where users can use the Grok chatbot. According to reports, the Grok 3 model will have significant improvements in reasoning, programming capabilities, and multimodal capabilities such as text and image analysis.
After Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek started the "open source war" of AI models, it set off the cost battle of global AI large models and accelerated the iteration of large models. Musk's xAI was founded in 2023, Grok 2 released in August 2024, although the initial performance is not inferior to OpenAI, Google Gemini, but with the continuous innovation and iteration of various AI models, it gradually lags behind later. On Feb. 16, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced that the company has updated ChatGPT 4o and said it has become "the best search product on the web."
The launch of the Grok 3 has been slower than Musk's original plan, which also indicates that the giant is stepping up its investment in computing power in the development of the larger model. To that end, Musk is raising money for xAI to buy more Nvidia GPUs. The latest news is that xAI is raising a new round of funding of about USD 10 billion (CNY 73 billion), valuing the company at about USD 75 billion (CNY 544 billion). In December, xAI announced that it had raised USD 6 billion (CNY 44 billion) in Series C funding. In addition to traditional venture capital companies, two chip giants, Nvidia and AMD, have also participated in the investment in xAI. According to the Wall Street Journal, SoftBank Group is also close to finalizing the first round of investment of USD 40 billion (CNY 290 billion) in OpenAI.