Billionaire Elon Musk has simply been countersued by OpenAI, however that isn’t stopping his AI firm, xAI, from making its flagship Grok 3 mannequin accessible by way of an API.
It has been a number of months since xAI unveiled Grok 3, the corporate’s reply to fashions like OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Google’s Gemini. Grok 3 can analyze photos and reply to questions, and powers a variety of options on Musk’s social community, X, which not-so-coincidentally was acquired by xAI in March.
xAI is providing two flavors of its flagship mannequin by way of its API: Grok 3 and Grok 3 Mini with “reasoning” capabilities.
Grok 3 is priced at $3 per million tokens (~750,000 phrases) fed into the mannequin and $15 per million tokens generated by the mannequin. In the meantime, Grok 3 Mini will price $0.30 per million enter tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens.
Speedier variations of Grok 3 and Grok 3 Mini can be found at a premium: $5 per million enter tokens and $25 per million output tokens for Grok 3; and $0.60 per million enter tokens and $4 per million output tokens for Grok 3 Mini.
Grok 3 isn’t low cost relative to the competitors. xAI is matching the pricing of Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet, which additionally affords reasoning capabilities, however it’s dearer than Google’s lately launched Gemini 2.5 Professional, which achieves usually increased scores than Grok 3 throughout common AI benchmarks. (Notably, xAI has been accused of being deceptive in its Grok 3 benchmark experiences.)
As a number of customers on X identified, Grok 3 by way of xAI’s API additionally has a smaller context window than the mannequin is supposedly able to supporting. (“Context window” refers to what number of tokens the mannequin can course of in a single go.) The API maxes out at 131,072 tokens, or roughly 97,500 phrases — in need of the 1 million tokens xAI claimed that Grok 3 supported in late February.
When Musk introduced Grok roughly two years in the past, he pitched the AI mannequin as edgy, unfiltered and anti-“woke” — basically, keen to reply controversial questions different AI techniques received’t. He delivered on a few of that promise. Instructed to be vulgar, for instance, Grok and Grok 2 would fortunately oblige, spewing colourful language you doubtless wouldn’t hear from ChatGPT.
However Grok fashions previous to Grok 3 hedged on political topics and wouldn’t cross sure boundaries. In truth, one research discovered that Grok leaned to the political left on matters like transgender rights, range packages and inequality.
Musk has blamed that habits on Grok’s coaching information — public internet pages — and pledged to “shift Grok nearer to politically impartial.” Wanting high-profile errors like briefly censoring unflattering mentions of President Donald Trump and Musk, it’s not but clear whether or not xAI has achieved that objective on the mannequin stage, and what the long-term penalties is likely to be.
