• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, February 18, 2025

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI has debuted an update to Grok-3 and launched DeepSearch -- challenging not only Google Search and Gemini, but OpenAI’s platforms and DeepSeek.

DeepSearch, xAI’s smart search engine, is supported by Grok-3. DeepSearch is a reasoning chatbot that expresses its process of understanding a query and how it plans to respond, and includes options for research, brainstorming and data analysis. The goal is also to release a voice-based chatbot.

“We’re continually improving the models every day, and literally within 24 hours, you’ll see improvements,” Musk said.

In early tests, Grok-3 outperformed OpenAI’s GPT-4o, Alphabet’s Google Gemini, DeepSeek’s V3 model and Anthropic’s Claude, xAI engineers said via a live stream on Monday.

The AI model also offers advanced reasoning for a variety of topics including physics. The engineers cited the ability for the model to create video games that combine two existing games, using Tetris and Bejeweled.

"We are seeing the beginnings of creativity," Musk said. 

XAI co-founders Jimmy Ba and Yuhuai Wu and lead engineer Igor Babuschkin joined Musk in the presentation. Ba described Deep Search as a "next generation search engine.” The product, he said, is one that "not just helps the engineers and research and scientists to do coding, but actually helps everyone answer questions that you have day to day."

During the past 17 month, Grok-3 has “more than 10 times” the compute power of its predecessor. In early tests, Grok-3 beats OpenAI’s GPT-4o, Alphabet’s Google Gemini, DeepSeek’s V3 model, and Anthropic’s Claude, xAI engineers said via a live stream on Monday.

Musk described the mission of xAI and Grok as understanding the nature of the universe. Those words might sound somewhat familiar.

During the early years in Google Search, co-founder Sergey Brin said the company’s mission was to index the world’s information to provide greater understanding.

Grok, which Musk said means to “fully and profoundly understand something,” got its name from the Robert Heinlein novel, “Stranger In A Strange Land.” The word Grok is used by a character in the book raised on Mars.

XAI had to build a massive data center to reach nearly 15x computing power. The company built its own data center to properly monitor cooling and other requirements. It took 122 days to build out and fully train the 100,000 GPUs. The next phase took 92 days to expand to 200,000 GPUs. The company believes it’s the biggest data center in the world.