If you’ve been on X, formerly Twitter, with any regularity, you’ll occasionally see a button prompt to ask the resident AI chatbot Grok for more context. Said chatbot, made by xAI, another one of Elon Musk’s companies, has been given a boost in performance, to the tune of “more than 10 times”, with the new version, simply named Grok-3.
As part of the launch presentation, the company claims that Grok-3 now features “advanced reasoning” capabilities. In other words, it can answer more complex questions by first breaking them down to smaller pieces, and fact-checking each piece before providing an answer. The first of two modes available is “Think”, which is the more straightforward one. Then there’s “Big Brain” – because of course it’s named after an internet meme – that gives it access to more computational power.
Grok-3 is available on the AI chatbot’s dedicated mobile app, but only for X Premium Plus subscribers, which costs RM177 a month, or RM1,756 a year. xAI also said that it will be launching a new subscription plan which it calls “SuperGrok”, for those who want “the most advanced capabilities and earliest access to new features”. There’s a claim going around that it costs US$30 (~RM133) a month, but it’s unclear if this is a new tier or an additional cost on top of the many variations of X Premium.
Other announcements include what is described as the “next generation search engine” in the form of Deep Search, similar to the likes of SearchGPT. Then there’s the ability for Grok to synthesise voices, as well as making Grok-2 open source in the coming months.
