Elon Musk entered the world of AI with a powerful AI assistant called Grok, developed by xAI. Following the launch of Grok 2, its successor, Grok 3, has now been released – a little later than initially predicted. Well before launch, Elon Musk claimed during a podcast with Jordan B. Peterson that it will be the “most powerful AI in the world” when it is released, and it’s looking like his claim is holding up so far.

The model has been trained at the Memphis Data Center on a supercomputer named ‘Colossus’ which is powered by over 100,000 Nvidia GPUs working day and night to ensure it is better than every other chatbot out there. Without further ado, let’s discuss the Grok 3 release date, pricing, and all the latest updates that you should know about.

Grok 3 release date – out now

Grok 3 has now officially been launched as of February 17th, with a launch stream taking place on over on X (formerly Twitter). Kicking things off with its mission statement to “understand the universe,” it’s clear that the latest version of the AI chatbot is aiming high as it looks to outperform the rest of the field. With the recent launch of even more competition from the likes of DeepSeek, xAI has its work cut out.

Prior to the February launch, Elon Musk claimed that Grok 3 was scheduled to arrive at the end of 2024, confirming that it has been trained on 100,000 H100s and should be “something special”. However, during his podcast with Jordan B. Peterson, Elon Musk confirmed that they’re training Grok 3 at the Memphis Data Center but are also actively working on improving Grok 2.

Grok 3 price updated

Up until the launch of Grok 3, the chatbot is available for Premium and Premium+ X users only. Following updated pricing from December 21, 2024, the Premium subscription costs $8 per month, while Premium+ costs $22. This cost of the latter has actually increased since last year; Premium+ would previously only cost you $16 a month.

In a post on X, it has been confirmed that Grok 3 is now available to all Premium+ subscribers. This means Premium (non-plus) subscribers or free users will have to stick to the Grok 2 model for the time being. It hasn’t been confirmed if or when Grok 3 is coming to the lower tier.

Grok 3 features and performance

The model is being trained at xAI's state-of-the-art supercomputing center in Memphis, Tennessee. Previously, in an interview with Nicolai Tangen, head of Norway’s sovereign fund, Elon Musk claimed that they used 20,000 H100 GPUs to train Grok 2. Now, for those who don’t know, these GPUs are not only expensive, with each costing between $30,000 and $40,000, but they are also incredibly powerful and capable of handling massive amounts of data and complex tasks simultaneously. However, the company is using 100,000 H100 GPUs to train Grok 3, which is 80,000 more than Grok 2.

Now that xAI is using a massive budget and many more resources, Grok 3 is significantly faster than Grok 2 and rival models. In fact, the current version may seem weak in front of it. What does this mean? Well, for starters, the new model will be able to generate results much faster, understand vast amounts of information quickly, and process real-time data, which should help it provide up-to-date information. Grok 3 should also be able to understand and generate human-like text with top-notch accuracy and without any errors.

Based on official Grok 3 benchmarks posted online, Grok 3 is the leading AI model in the following benchmarks:

• Math (AIME’24)
• Science (GPQA)
• Coding (LCB Oct-Feb)

Is Grok 3 cheaper than ChaptGPT?

The pro version of ChatGPT costs $20 per month, previously making it one of the more expensive AI chatbots on the market. There is of course a free version, but this fails to give you full access to the company’s latest models. It’s also worth noting that the ChatGPT 5 release date isn’t far away either. In any case, now that xAI has updated its pricing model, Grok 3 is more expensive than ChatGPT Plus; they cost $22 and $20 respectively.

When will Grok 3 be available for free?

Right now, we don’t expect to see Grok 3 become available for free to all X users any time soon. The latest AI chatbot is locked behind a Premium+ subscription, which means Grok 3 is priced at $22 a month. The good news, however, is that towards the end of 2024, xAI put out a blog post titled “Bringing Grok to Everyone” detailing its release of the Grok-2 model for all X users.

So, while Grok 3 isn’t currently available to non-subscribers, we expect it to become freely available once we draw close to the release of Grok 4, though there is no current timeframe in place for that just yet.

About the Author

Abdul Haddi

Abdul is a tech writer and Editor for PC Guide, specializing in all things tech, gaming, and hardware.