Elon Musk’s xAI adds ‘Big Brain’ reasoning to Grok-3

Elon Musk’s xAI unveiled Grok-3 on Tuesday, announcing that the new artificial intelligence model has “more than 10 times” the compute power of its predecessor. xAI said its latest flagship outperforms OpenAI’s GPT-4o, Google’s Gemini, and DeepSeek’s V3 models in early testing, and now features “advanced reasoning” capabilities.

So-called reasoning models are trained to answer more complex questions by breaking instructions down into smaller tasks and attempting to fact-check themselves before offering a solution, with the aim of providing stronger results. Similar models have been developed by rival companies, including OpenAI’s o1, DeepSeek’s R1, and Google’s Gemini Flash Thinking.

There are two Grok-3 reasoning modes available: “Think”, which will display Grok’s reasoning as it resolves requests; and “Big Brain” for complex tasks that require more computational power. xAI is also launching a Grok AI agent product called Deep Search, which the company describes as a “next generation search engine.”

Musk says that Grok-3 is a “maximally truth-seeking AI — even if that truth is sometimes at odds with what is politically correct.” Previous versions of the xAI chatbot have been criticized for spreading election misinformation and having fewer guardrails on text-to-image generation, allowing it to spit out questionable or offensive imagery. OpenAI is also exploring how to develop its models to “seek the truth” when handling controversial topics, but with the aim of maintaining certain safety rails.

The Grok-3 reasoning capabilities are available in the Grok app for subscribers to X Premium Plus, which now starts at $40 per month. This is the second hike for Premium Plus in two months, having increased from $16 to $22 in December. xAI said it is also launching a new subscription plan called SuperGrok that will provide “the most advanced capabilities and earliest access to new features.” SuperGrok will reportedly cost $30 per month, though it’s unclear if this is an additional charge on top of X subscriptions.

Elon Musk said that the Grok chatbot will soon gain a synthesized voice feature that sounds similar to OpenAI’s Advanced Voice Mode for ChatGPT. xAI is also planning to make Grok-2 open source in the coming months.