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Elon Musk’s xAI’s Grok 3 just might be ‘the smartest AI on Earth’

MacDailyNews

Feb 20

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Elon Musk: xAI's Grok 3 is 'the world's smartest AI model'

xAI’s Grok 3 is “the world’s smartest AI model,” according to xAI’s founder Elon Musk and early users think the claim not be hyperbole. “Grok has real-time knowledge. Big difference,” Musk wrote on his X social media platform Thursday morning.

pic.twitter.com/RpCTIUJAgW
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 20, 2025

Shirin Ghaffary for Bloomberg News:
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Musk and his team say they have built the “smartest AI on Earth.”
The company’s newest model, called Grok 3, outperforms the most advanced AI systems from companies like OpenAI and DeepSeek on benchmarks for mathematical reasoning and coding capabilities, according to evaluations put out by xAI. The startup also unveiled a new product called Deep Search that is designed to speed up online research, competing with similar services from OpenAI and others.
Every month, if not every week, AI developers release models that they say rival the best software on the market. But xAI’s claims received added attention given the startup’s significant fundraising muscle, as well as Musk’s stature in the industry and his intense rivalry with OpenAI, a company that just days earlier he had tried to take control of with an unsolicited bid. In the absence of standardized, industry-wide benchmarks, however, it’s difficult to say definitively where Grok 3 stands.
Companies typically rely on self-evaluations, which are inherently limited. They can choose which benchmarks to release and present them in the fashion of their choice. According to an xAI blog post, for example, Grok’s new model performed less competitively with OpenAI’s most advanced system on some of its evaluations when it put less computational power toward answering the question, sparking a debate on X between some employees of both companies. Musk’s startup also hasn’t yet released an application programming interface for Grok 3 that would allow for outside researchers to do independent evaluation.
Derya Unutmaz, a professor at the Jackson Laboratory who researches cancer immunotherapy, praised Grok 3 overall for being “more up to date,” likely because it leans on data from Musk’s social media platform, X. At least some of his positive impression also came down to the feel of the product, which is more subjective and harder to quantify.
“You feel like there’s someone behind the screen talking to you,” he said. “It doesn’t feel artificial. It has more of a voice.”

MacDailyNews Take: We switched our main genAI use from Google’s Genesis to Grok 2 months ago because it was clearly better in multiple ways, from summarizing text to generating images. Grok 3 beta, which we are now using, is clearly a major advance.
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MacDailyNews Note: Grok is available as a standalone app for iPhone and iPad via Apple’s App Store here and also via X.com here.

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