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 mannequin accessible by way of 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 quite a few 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 premium: $5/M enter tokens, $25/M output tokens for Grok 3 and $.60/M enter tokens, $4/M output tokens for Grok 3 Mini.
Grok 3 isn’t precisely low-cost relative to the competitors. It matches the pricing of Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet, which additionally affords reasoning capabilities, and it’s dearer than Google’s not too long ago launched Gemini 2.5 Professional, which achieves typically larger scores than Grok 3 throughout standard 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 — in need of 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” — generally, keen to reply controversial questions different AI techniques gained’t. He delivered on a few of that promise. Advised to be vulgar, for instance, Grok and Grok 2 would fortunately oblige, spewing colourful language you possible wouldn’t hear from ChatGPT.
However Grok fashions previous to Grok 3 hedged on political topics and wouldn’t cross sure boundaries. In truth, one examine discovered that Grok leaned to the political left on subjects like transgender rights, variety packages, and inequality.
Musk has blamed the conduct on Grok’s coaching knowledge — public internet pages — and pledged to “shift Grok nearer to politically impartial.” Wanting high-profile errors like briefly censoring unflattering mentions of President Donald Trump and Musk, it’s not but clear whether or not xAI has achieved that purpose on the mannequin stage — and what the long-term penalties could be.
