Musk Launches 'Grok3': 'Surpasses ChatGPT and DeepSeek'

'To be Deployed on SpaceX within 2 Years'

Musk: "The Smartest AI on Earth"

Trained for 200M Hours Using 100K GPUs

Claims 'Surpasses Competitors in Math & Science'

Voice Assistant to be Added in a Week

New Agent 'DeepSearch' Also Unveiled

Elon Musk, Tesla CEO who has built his empire in electric vehicles and reusable space launch vehicles and wields tremendous influence across nations as Donald Trump's 'special envoy', has one area where he hasn't achieved first place - the generative AI service industry. While his rival Sam Altman's OpenAI and recently China's startup DeepSeek have surprised the world, Musk's AI subsidiary xAI's 'Grok' hasn't achieved notable success yet. Seemingly trying to overcome this disadvantage, Musk unveiled Grok3 through his X (formerly Twitter) account on the 18th, emphasizing it as "the smartest AI on Earth."

◇ Musk Attempts to Overcome AI Disadvantage

Musk appeared on X with xAI engineers at 1 PM (Korean time). He emphasized Grok3's differentiation, stating "Grok3 uses 10 times more computing power than Grok2" and "it provides enhanced logical thinking and response capabilities as it was trained on data including extensive documents like court precedents." According to xAI, Grok3 underwent 200 million hours of data training on the 'Colossus' supercomputer equipped with 100,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs.

xAI announced that in evaluating major AI models using 2024 American Invitational Mathematics Examination (AIME) problems, Grok3 achieved 52% accuracy compared to DeepSeek's V3 at 39% and Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet at 26%. In the science benchmark 'GPQA', while V3 scored 59%, Claude 3.5 Sonnet 65%, and GPT-4o 50%, Grok3 reached 75%.

Musk also unveiled 'DeepSearch', a researcher-focused agent based on Grok3. An xAI representative described it as "the first generation of a comprehensive agent that not only helps engineers, researchers, and scientists code but also assists in answering everyday questions for everyone." xAI announced that Grok3 will be initially available to X's 'Premium Plus' subscription members (29,000 won monthly, 300,000 won annually).

◇ Long-standing Feud with Sam Altman

The name 'Grok' comes from the science fiction novel about Mars exploration, which was Musk's childhood favorite. In the novel, Grok, meaning Martian, represents 'deep understanding that fully absorbs, empathizes, and becomes one.' Musk has criticized OpenAI for improperly pursuing profit despite being established as non-profit, and sold all his OpenAI shares. This context explains Musk's recent $97.4 billion offer to acquire OpenAI's assets. Even DeepSearch appears to target OpenAI's similar model 'DeepResearch'. Musk explained, "With DeepSearch, (professional researchers) can complete tasks that would take an hour of web or social media searching in about 10 minutes."

The AI industry's response to the newly unveiled chatbot remains reserved. An industry insider predicted, "If Grok3 establishes itself stably in the market, there's a very high possibility that Musk's empire will become more consolidated through synergy with his other businesses like X, Neuralink, and SpaceX." Related to this, Musk revealed a teaser video at the end of the livestream, announcing "a voice assistant mode will be added to Grok3 in about a week." He also shared plans to implement Grok AI in SpaceX systems within two years.

Reporter Kyung-ju Kang qurasoha@hankyung.com