Billionaire Elon Musk may’ve simply been countersued by OpenAI. However that isn’t stopping his AI firm, xAI, from making its flagship Grok 3 model available via an API.
It has been a number of months since xAI unveiled Grok 3, the corporate’s reply to fashions like OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Google’s Gemini. Grok 3 can analyze photographs and reply to questions, and powers numerous options on Musk’s social community, X, which not-so-coincidentally acquired xAI in March.
xAI is providing two flavors of Grok 3 in its API: Grok 3 and Grok 3 Mini with “reasoning” capabilities. Grok 3 is priced at $3 per million tokens (~750,000 phrases) fed into the mannequin and $15 per million tokens generated by the mannequin. As for Grok 3 Mini, it’s $0.30 per million enter tokens and $.50 per million output tokens. Speedier variations of Grok 3 and Grok 3 Mini can be found at a big premium (Grok 3: $5/M enter tokens, $25/M output tokens; Grok 3 Mini: $.60/M enter tokens, $4/M output tokens).
Grok 3 isn’t precisely low cost relative to the competitors. It matches the pricing of Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet, which additionally presents reasoning capabilities, and it’s dearer than Google’s just lately launched Gemini 2.5 Professional, which achieves typically larger scores than Grok 3 throughout well-liked AI benchmarks. (Not for nothing, xAI has been accused of being deceptive in its Grok 3 benchmark reporting.)
As a number of customers on X identified, Grok 3 by way of xAI’s API additionally has a smaller context window than the mannequin is allegedly able to supporting. “Context window” refers to what number of tokens the mannequin can course of in a single go. The API maxes out at 131,072 tokens, or roughly 97,500 phrases — wanting the 1 million tokens xAI claimed that Grok 3 supported in late February.
When Musk introduced Grok roughly two years in the past, he pitched the AI mannequin as edgy, unfiltered, and anti-“woke” — on the whole, keen to reply controversial questions different AI methods gained’t. He delivered on a few of that promise. Informed to be vulgar, for instance, Grok and Grok 2 would fortunately oblige, spewing colourful language you doubtless wouldn’t hear from ChatGPT.
However Grok fashions previous to Grok 3 hedged on political topics and wouldn’t cross certain boundaries. The truth is, one study discovered that Grok leaned to the political left on subjects like transgender rights, range applications, and inequality.
Musk has blamed the conduct on Grok’s coaching information — public net pages — and pledged to “shift Grok nearer to politically impartial.” It’s not but clear whether or not xAI has achieved that purpose, and what the implications may be.