xAI Announces Grok-3 — a New Flagship Trained With 10x the Compute of Its Predecessor

xAI announced its latest flagship model, “Grok-3.” Elon Musk said it was trained with ten times the compute used for Grok-2, drawing major attention as a rival to models from OpenAI and DeepSeek.

Details

• Training scale: xAI said the model was trained using ten times the compute of the previous model, Grok-2
• Availability: Launched on the evening of February 17, 2025 (Pacific time), initially limited to X Premium+ and xAI’s SuperGrok subscribers
• Free access: Opened up to free users for a limited time on February 20
• Price change: Just hours after the announcement, the monthly price of X Premium+ rose from $22 to $40
• Future plans: At the time of announcement, xAI also said it planned to offer the model via an enterprise API

What happened next

The Grok-3 announcement underscored xAI’s ability, despite being a late entrant, to keep pace with OpenAI and DeepSeek in its release cadence. This strategy of pairing a launch with a price hike became a recurring pattern in xAI’s subsequent model announcements, and Grok rapidly became embedded as a core feature of X (formerly Twitter).