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Elon Musk’s xAI on Tuesday unveiled its latest artificial intelligence model, Grok 3, claiming it can outperform offerings from OpenAI and China’s DeepSeek based on early testing, which included standardized tests on math, science and coding. 

“We’re very excited to present Grok 3, which is, we think, an order of magnitude more capable than Grok 2 in a very short period of time,” Musk said at a demonstration of Grok 3 that was streamed on his social media platform X. 

The team also said it was launching a new product called “Deep Search,” which would act as a “next generation search engine.” 

Grok 3 will be rolled out for premium X subscribers later in the day, and will also be accessible through a separate subscription for the model’s web and app versions, the xAI team said.

Speaking at The World Governments Summit in Dubai last week Musk had dubbed the model “scary smart,” with powerful reasoning capabilities, claiming it outperformed all other existing models in xAI’s internal tests. 

“This might be the last time that an AI is better than Grok,” Musk said at the time, adding that it was trained on “a lot of synthetic data,” and was capable of reflecting upon its mistakes to achieve logical consistency. 

The xAI team claimed that an early iteration of Grok 3 had been given better ratings than existing competitors on Chatbot Arena, a crowdsourced website that pits different AI models against each other in blind tests.

Toward the end of the product demo, Musk said that the company will keep improving the model.

“We should emphasize that this is kind of a beta, meaning that you should expect some imperfections at first, but we will improve it rapidly, almost every day,” he said, adding that the voice assistance for the model would be released at a later time.

Intense competition 

Musk, who has been quite vocal about the potential dangers of artificial intelligence, started xAI in 2023 entering the generative AI market that includes OpenAI’s ChatGPT. 

In September last year, OpenAI launched its most advanced model, the o1, which came with reasoning abilities and was able to solve relatively complex science, coding and math tasks. 

Musk, along with Sam Altman, helped create OpenAI as a nonprofit in 2015.

However, in recent years Musk and OpenAI’s leadership have been feuding. Musk recently led an investor group that submitted a proposal to buy the AI startup’s nonprofit parent for $97.4 billion — an offer OpenAI declined. 

Last month, Chinese start-up DeepSeek shocked the AI market when it released a technical paper that claimed one of its open source models was able to rival the performance of OpenAI’s o1 model despite using a cheaper, less energy-intensive process.

It accomplished the feat in the face of the U.S. restricting leading AI chipmaker Nvidia from selling its cutting-edge GPUs — used for training AI models — to China. 

XAI has a “Colossus supercomputer,” for training AI, which it said last year was utilizing a cluster of 100,000 advanced Nvidia GPUs for AI training. On Tuesday, the company revealed that it doubled the size of its GPU cluster for the training of Grok 3.

While many AI and tech experts have told CNBC that DeepSeek has intensified AI competition, showing what can be done with less advanced technology, others are more skeptical about its impact. 

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Nvidia says its GPUs are a ‘generation ahead’ of Google’s AI chips

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Nvidia says its GPUs are a 'generation ahead' of Google's AI chips

Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang looks on as US President Donald Trump speaks at the US-Saudi Investment Forum at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC on November 19, 2025.

Brendan Smialowski | Afp | Getty Images

Nvidia on Tuesday said its tech remains a generation ahead of the industry, in response to Wall Street’s concerns that the company’s dominance of AI infrastructure could be threatened by Google’s AI chips.

“We’re delighted by Google’s success — they’ve made great advances in AI and we continue to supply to Google,” Nvidia said in a post on X. “NVIDIA is a generation ahead of the industry — it’s the only platform that runs every AI model and does it everywhere computing is done.”

The post came after Nvidia saw its shares fall 3% on Tuesday after a report that Meta, one of its key customers, could strike a deal with Google to use its tensor processing units for its data centers.

In its post, Nvidia said its chips are more flexible and powerful compared with so-called ASIC chips — such as Google’s TPUs — which are designed for a single company or function. Nvidia’s latest generation of chips are known as Blackwell.

“NVIDIA offers greater performance, versatility, and fungibility than ASICs,” Nvidia said in its post.

Nvidia has more than 90% of the market for artificial intelligence chips with its graphics processors, analysts say, but Google’s in-house chips have gotten increased attention in recent weeks as a viable alternative to the Blackwell chips, which are expensive but powerful.

Unlike Nvidia, Google doesn’t sell its TPU chips to other companies, but it uses them for internal tasks and allows companies to rent them through Google Cloud.

Earlier this month, Google released Gemini 3, a well-reviewed state-of-the-art AI model that was trained on the company’s TPUs, not Nvidia GPUs.

“We are experiencing accelerating demand for both our custom TPUs and Nvidia GPUs,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement. “We are committed to supporting both, as we have for years.”

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang addressed rising TPU competition on an earnings call earlier this month, noting that Google was a customer for his company’s GPU chips and that Gemini can run on Nvidia’s technology.

He also mentioned that he was in touch with Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind.

Huang said that Hassabis texted him to say that the tech industry theory that using more chips and data will create more powerful AI models — often called “scaling laws” by AI developers — is “intact.” Nvidia says that scaling laws will lead to even more demand for the company’s chips and systems.

WATCH: Meta reportedly in talks to use Google’s AI chips

Meta reportedly in talks to use Google's AI chips

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What Dick’s Sporting Goods’ earnings report tells us about Nike’s turnaround

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What Dick's Sporting Goods' earnings report tells us about Nike's turnaround

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Musk’s xAI to close $15 billion funding round in December: sources

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Musk's xAI to close  billion funding round in December: sources

Elon Musk attends the U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum in Washington, D.C., U.S., November 19, 2025.

Evelyn Hockstein | Reuters

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI is expected to close a $15 billion round at a $230 billion pre-money valuation next month, sources familiar with the matter told CNBC’s David Faber.

The deadline for allocation is the end of day on Tuesday, with the round expected to close on Dec. 19, the sources said.

This confirms earlier CNBC reporting that the company was raising $15 billion. The Tesla CEO later called the report on the round “False” in a post on the social media platform X.

At the time, sources told CNBC that xAI would use a large portion of the money for funding graphics processing units responsible for powering large language models.

CNBC had previously reported in September that the startup was looking to raise $10 billion at a $200 billion valuation.

The funding round is yet another sign of the insatiable demand for AI tools. Companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic, have raised billions and reached sky-high valuations as investors pour more money into companies building foundational AI models.

Sam Altman‘s OpenAI finalized a $6.6 billion-share sale at a $500 billion valuation last month, and Reuters recently reported that the ChatGPT maker was eying a $1 trillion initial public offering.

Anthropic closed a $13 billion funding round in September that roughly tripled its valuation from March.

Musk’s xAI is responsible for creating the Grok chatbot that has come under fire for disseminating hate speech, including antisemitic content. The company recently debuted Grokipedia, an AI-powered competitor to Wikipedia.

In March, Musk announced the merger of xAI with X in a deal valuing the social media platform at $33 billion.

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