Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, leads the artificial intelligence (AI) corporation xAI, which will unveil its next-generation chatbot 'Grok3' on the 17th of this month (local time). CEO Musk said, 'Grok3 will possess the best inference capabilities of any existing chatbot.' As competitors like OpenAI and DeepSeek continue to unveil next-generation AI models, attention is focused on whether Grok3 can become a 'game changer' that alters the dynamics of the market.
◇ Musk: 'The smartest AI on Earth'
According to industry sources on the 17th, in the AI market, major big tech corporations like OpenAI, Google, DeepSeek, and Meta are engaged in fierce competition with open-source-based models, raising interest in whether Grok3 can change the game.
CEO Musk noted on social media X (formerly Twitter) on the 16th that 'the distribution of Grok3 will take place alongside a live demonstration,' adding that 'as the smartest AI on Earth, Grok3 shows better performance than any existing chatbot according to our tests.'
Grok3 is an AI chatbot developed by xAI, trained on the Colossus supercomputer equipped with 100,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs. The H100 is the latest GPU optimized for AI learning, providing a maximum computational performance of 60 petaflops (PFLOPS) based on FP8 (8-bit floating point). The theoretical calculation indicates that Grok3's training could utilize a total of 6 exaflops (EFLOPS) of computational power. While the training computational amount for OpenAI's GPT-4 has not been officially disclosed, industry estimates suggest it is around 1 to 2 exaflops.
The actual user test results regarding key factors of AI performance evaluation such as factual response accuracy, contextual understanding, and hallucination problem-solving capabilities have yet to be disclosed.
The industry is paying attention to whether Grok3 can acquire differentiated competitiveness compared to existing AI models. After seizing the AI market with ChatGPT, OpenAI is preparing for a significant upgrade with the development of GPT-5. Recently, OpenAI announced that 'all models following GPT-5 will feature advanced inference capabilities.'
Chinese AI startup DeepSeek emerged as a new contender this year by launching the 'R1' model. The DeepSeek R1 has been evaluated to achieve performance comparable to GPT-4o at a relatively low expense (approximately $5 million), adopting a strategy of offering some training techniques as open-source while not disclosing training data.
Meta's DeepHermes, based on Llama 3.1, has also recently been unveiled, joining the AI inference competition. DeepHermes focuses particularly on solving complex problems and aims to enhance the logical thinking capabilities of AI models.
Kim Myung-joo, head of the AI Safety Research Institute, said, 'Grok3 seems to be the most freely learned AI among existing chatbots,' adding, 'Generally, AI models filter out unethical or low-quality data, but Musk has taken the position that such information should also be learned from the beginning.'
He observed, 'However, there is a high possibility that the images or responses generated by Grok may include elements that could be somewhat controversial. Users might encounter unexpected reactions, which could raise ethical controversies.'
◇ Is Grok moving from 'X exclusive' to open AI?
Grok appears to be taking steps to transition to open AI by releasing an independent iOS and Android app, moving away from its previous exclusive service on the X (formerly Twitter) platform.
The Grok2 version is currently available as an independent iOS app, with the Android version registered on the Google Play Store and pre-orders ongoing. This indicates that Grok is shifting from a previous X premium exclusive service to a more open AI service.
This change is interpreted as a strategy to expand its position in the competition against existing AI market leaders. As other chatbot services, such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, are offered across various platforms like web, mobile, and API, Grok3 has a high possibility of expanding into a more open service.
xAI has yet to officially state whether it will support a web-based version along with providing an API (application programming interface) externally long-term. Compared to existing AI models that offer broad accessibility through web, mobile, and API, there are concerns about how open a ecosystem Grok3 will be able to build.
Choi Byeong-ho, a professor at Korea University's AI Research Institute, pointed out, 'For Grok to secure competitiveness, it must either focus entirely on an AI inference model like DeepSeek or strengthen multimodal functions like OpenAI. Otherwise, it could end up being merely an upgrade of a simple chatbot.'
He added, 'As the competition in the AI market has become too complex recently, xAI likely could not remain idle. While it's a strategy to connect AI with other businesses that Musk has, such as X, Neuralink, and SpaceX, the intensified competition has led to an environment where a more open ecosystem is inevitable.'