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.”

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.