Elon Musk has announced that Grok 3, xAI’s latest artificial intelligence model, will be available for free for a limited time and it has already shot to the top of the Apple App Store charts.
“For a short time, Grok 3 is available for free to all,” stated Musk on X while sharing an official announcement from xAI that hailed the AI as the “world’s smartest AI”.
For a short time, Grok 3 is available for free to all! https://t.co/r5iLXi2pBm
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 20, 2025
Musk then followed this by sharing a screenshot of Grok at number one on the Apple App Store’s free apps chart, above rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
This is without voice mode and many other features coming out in the next few days pic.twitter.com/yofueZ7bmA
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 20, 2025
Grok 3 is xAI’s most advanced version yet and the company states that it has displayed “significant improvements in reasoning, mathematics, coding, world knowledge and instructions following tasks”.
“Grok 3 is in a league of its own across the board. Even its smaller counterpart, Grok 3-Mini, is reaching the cutting edge compared to other competitors,” added the xAI team during Grok 3’s live-streamed launch event.
xAI has positioned Grok as a competitor in the increasingly crowded AI assistant space, rivalling the likes of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google DeepMind’s Gemini and DeepSeek’s R1 model.
It claims that its new model surpasses its competitors on a number of benchmarks including AIME, which evaluates a model’s performance on a sampling of math questions, and GPQA, which assesses models using PhD-level physics, biology and chemistry problems.
When first launched on Monday, only subscribers to X’s Premium+ tier had access to Grok 3 but now it is available to all across Grok’s web and iOS app.
It is unclear how long the unfettered access will last, however, xAI did humorously caveat on X that it is “until our servers melt”, in anticipation of the significant interest in the model.
OpenAI Chief Executive rebuffs Musk takeover offer
Earlier this month, Elon Musk and a group of co-investors offered $97.4bn to buy the non-profit that controls OpenAI.
The bid was in response to OpenAI’s Chief Executive Sam Altman’s ambitions to convert the company to a for-profit entity, which Musk claims betrays the founding mission of the start-up he helped to found alongside Altman and others in 2015.
Altman hit back at the offer on X, stating: “No thank you but we will buy Twitter for $9.74bn if you want.” Musk purchased Twitter for $44bn in June 2024 before renaming it to X.
