Is Grok-3 AI Better Than Deepseek?

February 18th - Elon Musk and his xAI company have introduced their latest AI model, Grok-3. Available now to Premium+ X subscribers, Grok-3 is the latest bid for supremacy in the current AI arms race launched into overdrive by the recent release of the Chinese AI model, DeepSeek r1.

Lets drive into what we know about this new LLM as of now.

Tables of Contents

• What is Grok-3?

• What is DeepSeek?

• Grok-3 vs DeepSeek

• The AI Arms Race

What is Grok-3?

Grok-3 AI is the latest evolution of Elon Musk’s Grok AI model, a large language model integrated into the Tesla owner’s social media platform, X. His AI company, xAI has also launched a new subscription tier called SuperGrok for those who prefer to access the AI chatbot from Grok.com or mobile app.

To announce the release, Musk held a press conference over livestream with three xAI engineers where they discussed Grok'-3’s benchmark innovations which include DeepSearch, a smart search engine and reasoning model that articulates its thought process when answer user queries, AI coding for online games, and a big brain mode for more complex problems.

Users know Grok-2's performance leaves something to be desired when compared to ChatGPT and DeepSeek, however speaking in reference to Grok-3, Musk said this current release is only a beta version and to expect imperfections.

What is Deepseek?

Before we see how Grok-3 compares to DeepSeek’s r1 model, lets briefly establish what DeepSeek is. We’ve reported on the Chinese startup in the past but to refresh our readers’ memory, DeepSeek is a Chinese reasoning model with similar if not superior problem-solving capabilities as ChatGPT’s recent o-1 model, only created for a fraction of the price.

OpenAI required over $100 million USD to develop the Nvidia chips that went into the o-1 model’s training while DeepSeek was able to create their model for around $6 million. This develop sent shock waves through the tech world and stunted numerous tech stocks. The amount of computer power DeepSeek was able to harness at such a small price, while offering their model as open-source, changed the terms of the AI market forever.

Grok-3 vs Deepseek

Musk claims that Grok-3, beyond simply being superior to Grok-2, is now the smartest AI model on the market, able to outperform DeepSeek V3, Anthropic's Claud 3.5, and GPT-4o.

Although offering new functions for research, data-analysis, and brainstorming, the advancement’s superiority over other models has yet to be demonstrated.

Both v3 and Grok-3 models feature dynamic flash thinking, which shows users how it arrives at the answers it gives them. As far as costs go, DeepSeek's 6 million dollar investment made history while the updates from Grok-2 to Grok-3 appear at first glance to be too small relative to financing xAI has raised to develop the model.

The market and AI news have yet to react to Grok 3’s announcement with the same shock and awe as DeepSeek’s release, however only time will tell if Musk’s new model makes his xAI a competitive player in the AI Arms race.

The AI Arms Race

When we zoom out of the artificial intelligence field and see it as a race between nations, suddenly the scales seem to readjust in favor of American companies over the brief Chinese sprint ahead of the pack.

If we simply see the AI Arms race as a battle between startups and corporations, we see DeepSeek pitted against the likes of Google Gemini, Microsoft, OpenAI, and now, xAI. If there wasn’t so much in-fighting between these groups, DeepSeek would have a harder time keeping an upper hand over their American competitors.

In-fighting like Musk’s constant attacks on Sam Altman over X, or a consortium of investors led by Musk to acquire OpenAI’s non-profit assets for $97.4 billion, which OpenAI rejected.

Now might be the most thrilling time to be a tech geek, with endless entertainment and AI advancement ahead in the form of this AI Arms race. Simply watching this gauntlet between mega-powers isn’t enough to get the full experience of this time in tech history, one has to take each tool for a test drive and see how they can improve your life. From undetectable tools to state of the art reasoning, chatbots are only beginning to transform humanity’s relationship with computers.