US billionaire Elon Musk unveils new artificial intelligence chatbot

Elon Musk’s start-up xAI released its Grok 3 chatbot* right on time after the tech tycoon* earlier billed it as the “smartest AI on Earth”.

“Grok 3 release with live demo on Monday night at 8pm PT. Smartest AI on Earth,” Musk wrote on his social media platform X on Sunday.

The company’s flagship* artificial intelligence* (AI) product aims to rival existing models in the industry and was released on schedule via a live demonstration Tuesday afternoon Australian time.

Musk had previously hinted at the latest chatbot competing with the likes of ChatGPT and DeepSeek.

“Grok 3 has very powerful reasoning capabilities*, so in the tests that we’ve done thus far, Grok 3 is outperforming anything that’s been released, that we’re aware of, so that’s a good sign,” he said.

WHAT CAPABILITIES DOES GROK 3 HAVE?
Addressing the World Governments Summit in Dubai last week, Musk talked about Grok 3’s ability to reduce the rate of errors that creep into AI, often called “hallucinations*”.

Musk said Grok 3 cuts errors by going back and forth through the data, achieving logical consistency, so if it has wrong data that doesn’t match reality, theoretically Grok 3 will be able to detect and correct the mistake.

Musk also said that Grok 3 was trained using more computing power than any other Grok model so far, and that a lot of synthetic* data has been used in the training process.

He did not reveal details about the chatbot’s image generation capability, with xAI offering some of the best photorealistic* image rendering* around.

Last December xAI announced that it was using a new Aurora image model.

“We trained the model on billions of examples from the internet, giving it a deep understanding of the world,” the December statement said. “As a result, it excels at photorealistic rendering and precisely following text instructions.

“Beyond text, the model also has native support for multimodal* input, allowing it to take inspiration from or directly edit user-provided images.”

Grok differs from other AI image generators because it enables you to create images of celebrities, cartoon superheroes and politicians, seemingly without restriction.

Grok 3 will also be three times faster that Grok 2 and will have better accuracy, plus improved multilingual* and instruction-following capacity.

MUSK’S MIXED MESSAGE
Musk has repeatedly warned that AI poses a risk to human civilisation, but he is nonetheless pushing hard for a bigger slice of investment in the sector.

xAI said in December it raised $AUD9.4 billion ($US6 billion) in its latest funding round from investors that included US venture capitalists, chipmakers Nvidia and AMD, and investment funds from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, among others.

The company is now one of the world’s most valuable start-ups, though still dwarfed by OpenAI.

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GLOSSARY

• chatbot: a software program that simulates and processes human conversation (either written or spoken), allowing users to interact with it like they’re communicating with a real person
• tycoon: very successful business person who has become very wealthy and powerful
• flagship: in this usage, it refers to the best or most important product, idea, thing an organisation owns, does or produces
• artificial intelligence: AI is the ability of a computer system to perform tasks that would normally require human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, and making decisions
• reasoning capabilities: ability to assess and apply logic based on new or existing information when making a decision or solving a problem
• hallucinations: incorrect or misleading results that AI models generate, from its more traditional definition of seeing things that are not there or do not exist
• synthetic: products made by artificial elements, often copying something natural
• photorealistic: an image of such high quality that it looks like a photograph or film of a real person or place
• rendering: the way something is presented, the level at which it is created, for instance 3D rendering is the process of creating a photorealistic 2D image from 3D models
• multimodal: has several ways of operating or dealing with something, for instance across a number of device types
• multilingual: able to use two or more languages

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QUICK QUIZ

1. What is the name of Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence start-up?
2. Musk has hinted that his new chatbot will compete with which two products?
3. The frequent errors in AI are known by what name?
4. How does Grok differ from other AI image generators?
5. How much money did Musk’s start-up raise in its latest funding round in December?

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CLASSROOM ACTIVITIES
1. What is Grok 3?

After reading about the new chatbot Grok 3, answer the following questions from the Kids News article:

• What is Grok 3?
• Who produced Grok 3?
• Who owns the rights to Grok 3?
• When will it be available for the public to use?
• How do you use Grok 3?
• What might you use Grok 3 for in your life?
• Why has it been touted as the smartest AI tool yet?

Time: allow 15 minutes to complete this activity
Curriculum Links: English, Digital Technologies, Personal and Social, Critical and Creative Thinking

2. Extension
Musk has repeatedly warned that AI poses a risk to human civilisation, but continues investing billions of dollars to continue to advance the technology. What might his reasoning be for doing so?

Time: allow 10 minutes to complete this activity
Curriculum Links: English, Digital Technologies, Ethical, Personal and Social, Critical and Creative Thinking

VCOP ACTIVITY
To sum it up
After reading the article, use your comprehension skills to summarise in a maximum of three sentences what the article is about.

Think about:

What is the main topic or idea?

What is an important or interesting fact?

Who was involved (people or places)?

Use your VCOP skills to re-read your summary to make sure it is clear, specific and well punctuated.