xAI Launches New Grok 3 Model for X Premium+ Subscribers

xAI, Elon Musk’s AI startup released yesterday Grok 3, the latest version of its chatbot designed to compete with other flagship AI models such as OpenAI’s GPT-4o. During an hour-long presentation, the company showed different benchmarks showing that Grok 3 is indeed a highly competitive model.

Grok-2, xAI’s previous flagship AI model launched in beta in August and became available for free for all users in December. X Premium and Premium+ users still benefit from higher usage limits and early access to new features. Grok 3, however, will be exclusively available to X Premium+ subscribers at launch. The subscription is also getting a price hike, and some Grok 3 features will require users to pay for a new $30/month “SuperGrok” plan.

“We’re very excited to present Grok 3, which is, we think, an order of magnitude more capable than Grok 2 in a very short period of time,” Musk said during the xAI presentation yesterday. “Our team has been working extremely hard over the last few months to improve Grok as much as we can, so we can give all of you access to it.”

Grok 3 benchmarks.

The thing to really pay attention to in AI is learning speed. And @xai is learning way faster than any other.

Who said that?

Apple Siri cofounder Tom Gruber. He told me at dinner a decade ago that that is the most important thing to pay attention to. pic.twitter.com/yWCiJsN9pU

— Robert Scoble (@Scobleizer) February 18, 2025

The new AI will offer different reasoning modes including “Think,” “Big Brain” for more complex queries, and “DeepSearch.” The latter was described as a “next-generation search engine.”

Grok 3 will roll out to X users and the standalone Grok app, but it will require an X Premium+ subscription, which now costs $39.83/month in the US (previously $22/month). xAI also announced yesterday that a Grok 3 API will be available for developers in the coming weeks and that its previous Grok 2 model will be open-sourced in the coming months.

If you’re in the EU or the UK, be aware that the standalone Grok app is still not available on the web or mobile devices. The store listing for the Grok mobile app on the App Store currently indicates a February 28 availability date in the EU.