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Grok 3, xAI’s latest AI model, has officially entered the race against OpenAI’s o1 and DeepSeek’s R1. Just days after making headlines with his bid to acquire OpenAI, Elon Musk unveiled Grok 3, calling it “the most powerful AI in the world right now.” And if the live demo benchmarks are accurate, that claim may have some weight.
Unlike traditional AI models that generate direct answers, Grok 3 joins the new wave of reasoning models, which break down complex problems step by step before arriving at a conclusion. But xAI isn’t limiting Grok 3 to just one category—in its default mode, it functions like GPT-4o or Claude 3.5 Sonnet, optimized for general tasks. However, enabling Think Mode unlocks a more advanced reasoning approach, allowing it to tackle highly intricate problems.
So, how does Grok 3 truly measure up? Is it a game-changer in AI reasoning, or does it still have gaps to fill? If you missed the live demo, don’t worry—I’ll break down its key strengths, weaknesses, and overall performance for you.
At its core, Grok 3 is an advanced AI system built by xAI, the company founded by Elon Musk. The model claims to be 10 to 15 times more powerful than Grok 2, making a substantial leap in both reasoning ability and general-purpose AI functionality.
Unlike purely conversational AI models like GPT-4o or Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Grok 3 new AI model introduces a dual-mode approach:
This flexibility makes it one of the first AI models designed to function as both a generalist and a reasoning AI.
Traditional AI models like GPT-4, Claude, or Gemini rely on pattern recognition to predict and generate text-based responses. However, reasoning models like Grok 3 approach problem-solving differently:
The potential of Grok 3 new AI model in debugging, test case generation, and software verification is immense, especially for developers working on mission-critical applications.
The competition in reasoning-based AI is heating up, with OpenAI’s o1 and DeepSeek’s R1 emerging as strong contenders. While official third-party benchmarks are yet to be released, xAI’s live demo suggests that Grok 3 matches or surpasses these models in:
If these results hold, Grok 3 new AI model could become the go-to tool for developers needing high-accuracy computations and logical breakdowns.
Not every task requires the full-scale reasoning power of Grok 3. Grok 3 Mini is designed to be a lighter, faster, and more cost-efficient version while retaining the essential reasoning capabilities of its larger counterpart.
For developers, this means:
Despite being a lighter model, Grok 3 Mini retains a strong reasoning ability, ensuring that developers can still leverage its multi-step problem-solving techniques without the overhead of a full-scale model. According to benchmarks, it can handle most queries seamlessly while offering a faster user experience.
One of the standout features of Grok 3 new AI model is Think Mode, an optional setting that transforms the model from a standard AI into a powerful reasoning engine.
When Think Mode is enabled, Grok 3:
This makes it particularly useful for:
Here are the results: https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5_bc9115c4-a513-4e91-9da3-f3266554d0e9
With Think Mode off, Grok 3 behaves like GPT-4o or Claude 3.5 Sonnet—fast, conversational, and suited for general tasks. However, when Think Mode is activated, it shifts into an advanced reasoning state, carefully working through complex challenges.
Interestingly, xAI has positioned Grok 3 as both a reasoning model and a generalist AI. This is evident from benchmark comparisons, where Grok 3 was tested against reasoning models like OpenAI’s o1 and DeepSeek’s R1, as well as generalist models like GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3, and Claude 3.5 Sonnet. This suggests that xAI aims for Grok 3 to be a hybrid AI—capable of excelling in both general conversation and structured reasoning.
Big Brain Mode is Grok 3’s high-performance setting, designed to handle demanding computational tasks that require more reasoning depth and accuracy. Unlike the standard mode, Big Brain Mode leverages additional compute power to refine responses further, ensuring higher accuracy and deeper insights.
How Big Brain Mode Works
When Big Brain Mode is enabled, Grok 3 new AI model:
This mode is ideal for:
While Big Brain Mode prioritizes accuracy over speed, it ensures Grok 3 delivers high-quality, well-reasoned outputs, making it a go-to for deep analytical tasks.
DeepSearch is xAI’s built-in research tool, allowing Grok 3 to browse the web, verify sources, and synthesize real-time information before generating a response.
Unlike standard AI models, which rely primarily on pre-trained data, Grok 3 DeepSearch actively retrieves live data from the web, making it a powerful competitor to Gemini’s Deep Research and OpenAI’s Deep Research tools.
Here are the results: https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5_2c339c59-2e8f-4065-b7d7-2734e7798282
With DeepSearch enabled, Grok 3 becomes a more dynamic research assistant, suitable for news aggregation, academic research, and high-precision fact-checking.
The evolution of Grok has been rapid, with Grok 3 representing a major leap in both performance and computational power.
With these advancements, Grok 3 new AI model positions xAI as a serious competitor in the AI reasoning and generalist model space, closing the gap with industry leaders.
xAI claims Grok 3 is among the most powerful AI models to date, and the live demo benchmarks suggest it can compete with the best. Below is a breakdown of its performance across math, science, and coding, comparing it to leading models like GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Gemini-2 Pro, and DeepSeek-V3, as well as reasoning-focused models like O1 and DeepSeek-R1.
The first benchmark set evaluates Grok 3 and Grok 3 Mini against general-purpose AI models.
Such tests would give deeper insights into Grok 3’s real-world capabilities.
When Grok 3’s reasoning capabilities are fully activated—meaning Think Mode and Big Brain Mode are turned on—its performance jumps dramatically. This second benchmark set compares:
Interestingly, the graph suggests Grok 3 Mini remains highly competitive, proving that even a smaller variant of the model can tackle complex problem-solving efficiently.
In blind, user-voted evaluations on LMArena—a crowd-sourced LLM benchmarking platform—Grok 3 has set a new milestone.
Unlike traditional AI benchmarks that rely on static test sets, LMArena uses live human feedback in a blind A/B test format, making it one of the most reliable indicators of real-world AI performance.
An early version of Grok 3 (codenamed “Chocolate”) has officially taken the #1 spot, surpassing leading models like GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Gemini 1.5 Pro.
Grok 3 has also become the first-ever model to exceed 1400 ELO on LMArena—outperforming all competitors across multiple categories, including:
These results position Grok 3 as a groundbreaking advancement in real-world AI usability, proving its ability to handle a wide range of tasks with both depth and accuracy.
Early real-world testing of Grok 3 has yielded mixed but promising results. While its reasoning capabilities are among the best, some areas still lag behind OpenAI’s top-tier models.
Andrej Karpathy—who had early access—shared on X that Grok 3’s Think Mode solves complex problems better than many competitors. He tested it on a Settlers of Catan programming task that most other models failed, and Grok 3 succeeded.
Grok 3 performed well on structured logic problems, correctly solving multiple tic-tac-toe challenges by reasoning through chains of moves.
The Deep Search tool was praised for pulling in high-quality, real-time information about recent events—such as Apple product launch rumors and stock movements. Its research capabilities were compared to Perplexity's Deep Research, though it still falls short of OpenAI’s retrieval systems.
Early testers noted that Grok 3 struggled with complex coding tasks compared to GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet, which consistently generated more efficient solutions.
While strong in structured problem-solving, Grok 3 failed Andrej Karpathy’s Unicode emoji mystery challenge, where DeepSeek-R1 made more progress.
In his tweet, Karpathy noted:
"[Grok 3] did not solve my question where I give a smiling face with an attached message hidden inside Unicode variation selectors, even when I give a strong hint on how to decode it in the form of Rust code. The most progress I've seen is from DeepSeek-R1, which once partially decoded the message. "
The model’s humor capabilities are limited, often recycling the same puns instead of generating fresh, creative jokes—resembling older LLMs rather than newer conversational AI models.
Andrej Karpathy also found that Grok 3 hallucinates citations and sometimes generates fake URLs, a problem commonly seen in AI models that lack robust source verification.
While Grok 3 shows major strengths in reasoning and logic, its coding accuracy, creativity, and factual reliability still need improvement to match the best in the field.
Grok 3 is not just another AI model—it’s a statement. With its powerful reasoning engine, advanced search capabilities, and top-tier performance across benchmarks, it is emerging as a serious competitor in the AI landscape. While it still has areas to improve, particularly in coding, humor, and fact-checking, its strengths in logic, problem-solving, and real-time research set it apart.
At GoCodeo, we’re excited about this launch and looking forward to integrating Grok 3 into our ecosystem. The future of AI-assisted development is here—and this is just the beginning.
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