Hello, tech enthusiasts! Let’s dive into some exciting news from the world of artificial intelligence.

Billionaire Elon Musk may find himself battling it out in court with OpenAI, but that doesn’t deter his ambitions. His AI venture, xAI, is all set to launch the Grok 3 model through a shiny new API.

After months of anticipation since its debut, Grok 3 has emerged as Musk’s answer to formidable competitors like OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Google’s Gemini. This model boasts some impressive features, including image analysis and responsive question handling; it’s already playing a significant role on Musk’s social network, X.

Available in two variations, Grok 3 and Grok 3 Mini, users can expect different pricing structures. For Grok 3, it’s $3 per million tokens ingested and $15 for those generated. Meanwhile, the Mini version offers a cost-effective $0.30 for input tokens and $0.50 for outputs.

While xAI aims to be competitive, Grok 3’s pricing is on par with Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet yet more costly than Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro, which tends to score higher on various AI benchmarks.

Users on X have raised eyebrows over claims regarding Grok 3’s capabilities, particularly its context window, which currently maxes at 131,072 tokens instead of the previously advertised 1 million.

When Grok was first introduced, it was marketed as an edgy and unfiltered AI, ready to tackle controversial topics. As history shows, it indeed met some of those expectations. Previous versions of Grok were known to embrace a bit of colorful language when prompted.

However, Grok 3 remains under scrutiny as it reflects certain biases, often leaning left on various political issues. Musk has attributed this to the training data sourced from public web pages and has vowed to adjust Grok’s stance to be more neutral.

Time will tell how effectively xAI can navigate these challenges and what implications that might have on AI ethics moving forward.