The most noteworthy news in the tech world today is the release of xAI's Grok-3 large language model. It's said that this AI model possesses human-like thinking abilities, mainly because it uses the "chain of thought" technique. This allows it to break down complex tasks layer by layer for in-depth analysis, somewhat like OpenAI's o3 and Deepseek-r1.
Speaking of Grok-3, we must mention its creator, Elon Musk. This tech mogul directly declared Grok-3 as "the smartest AI on Earth," even adding, "Scarily smart." He believes Grok-3 has incredibly powerful reasoning abilities, and in his tests, no other AI model can match it.
The Grok series was launched by Musk in 2023 with a clear goal: to challenge OpenAI's ChatGPT. Grok-1 was released in November 2023, and Grok-2 followed in August 2024. This Grok-3 is the latest upgrade in the series.
Speaking of OpenAI, it is undoubtedly a leader in the AI field today. There's a story to be told about its relationship with Musk, and the origin of Grok is related to this history.
OpenAI was initially founded in San Francisco in 2015 by Sam Altman, Musk, and five others, with a combined investment of $1 billion. At that time, OpenAI and Musk were in a "honeymoon period." It's said that Sam wanted to attract talent with high salaries, and Musk supported him without hesitation! Back then, joining OpenAI meant a $300,000 annual salary plus SpaceX stock, which was quite a generous package.
OpenAI's initial vision was to be a non-profit organization, open-sourcing technology and developing AI for the benefit of humanity. However, OpenAI gradually transformed into a closed-source, for-profit company. This displeased Musk, who felt that OpenAI had changed and become an "appendage" to large companies like Microsoft. Later, Musk was excluded from the OpenAI board of directors. Although he said he was still willing to invest, a rift had formed, which is one of the reasons why he later created Grok.
In March 2019, OpenAI officially announced its transition from "non-profit" to "limited profit," with a profit cap of 100 times the investment. Musk publicly criticized OpenAI, believing they had forgotten their original intention and were only focused on making money, ignoring the potential risks posed by AI. He sarcastically suggested renaming OpenAI to "CloseAI."
On February 10th of this year, Musk offered to acquire OpenAI for $97.4 billion, but was rejected and countered by Sam, who claimed he would acquire Musk's Twitter. If Musk had actually acquired OpenAI, he probably would have open-sourced it directly, which would undoubtedly be a good thing for the entire AI field.
In conclusion, the release of Grok-3 is a major event in the AI field. The "love-hate relationship" between Musk and OpenAI has also added a lot of talking points to the AI world. As for how powerful Grok-3 actually is, you can try it out yourself!
Use Grok for Free in Your Browser
Official website: https://grok.com
Currently, the web chat feature is open for free, and you can use it without logging in or paying. However, due to some well-known reasons, domestic users may need a VPN to access it.
Use API to call Grok
The API is compatible with OpenAI SDK. Just replace the API URL with https://api.x.ai/v1
Then create an API KEY on this page: https://console.x.ai
Available models include: grok-2-latest, grok-2-vision-latest, and grok-3.