Elon Musk’s AI startup, xAI, just rolled out Grok 3, the latest upgrade to its chatbot tech, aiming to go head-to-head with OpenAI—right after Musk’s surprise cash offer to buy the company got shut down.

The launch happened during a livestream with Musk himself, where he hyped up Grok 3 as “an order of magnitude more capable than Grok 2.”

One of its biggest flexes is a new feature called DeepSearch, which xAI is calling “the next generation search engine.” It pulls info from the internet and X (formerly Twitter) to generate quick research summaries.

There are a few versions of Grok 3: the Grok 3 mini model, which is fast but not always on point, and the more advanced Grok 3 Reasoning and Grok 3 mini Reasoning models, designed to handle human-like analysis.

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xAI also dropped another update: the Grok app is getting a voice mode within a week, meaning users will soon be able to chat with Grok in a synthesized voice.

Meanwhile, xAI says it plans to open-source Grok 2 in the coming months.

If you want to try Grok 3, you’ll need to be on X’s Premium+ tier, which now costs a hefty $40/month in the U.S. (a massive jump from $16 to $22 just two months ago).

xAI is also planning a separate subscription option called SuperGrok for $30/month, which will let users access Grok outside of X, including on the web.

For context, Grok 3 isn’t the only AI model tackling reasoning tasks—competitors like DeepSeek’s R1 and OpenAI’s o3-mini are also in the mix.

But during the launch, xAI claimed that Grok 3 Reasoning outperformed OpenAI’s best o3-mini model on several benchmarks.

Musk and xAI clearly aren’t backing down in the AI race—now it’s just a matter of whether users think Grok is worth the price tag.