Grok 3 API launched—Musk's 'anti-woke' AI now available for everyone
What's the story
Elon Musk's artificial intelligence (AI) firm, xAI, has launched an application programming interface (API) for its flagship model, Grok 3. The development comes amid countersuit against Musk by OpenAI. Introduced a few months ago as a competitor to models like GPT-4o and Google's Gemini, Grok 3 can analyze images and answer questions. It also powers several features on Musk's social network, X, which was acquired by xAI in March.
API details
Grok 3 API offers 2 versions with reasoning capabilities
The newly launched xAI API offers two flavors of Grok 3: the standard version and a mini variant, both with "reasoning" capabilities. The models are priced depending on how many tokens the model processes or generates. For example, the standard Grok 3 model comes at $3 per million tokens fed into it and $15 per million tokens generated by it.
Pricing structure
Grok 3 Mini and premium versions available
Grok 3 Mini costs $0.30 per million input tokens and $0.50 for every million output tokens. If you want faster processing times, you can opt for premium versions of both models at an additional cost. The accelerated Grok 3 model is priced at $5/M input tokens and $25/M output tokens, while the speedy Grok 3 Mini costs $0.6/M input tokens and $4/M output tokens.
Market comparison
Grok 3's pricing and performance compared to competitors
Grok 3's pricing isn't much lower than that of its competitors. It matches the cost of Anthropic's Claude 3.7 Sonnet, which also offers reasoning capabilities, but is pricier than Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro. Users on X have also noted that the API has a smaller context window than what xAI had initially claimed back in February.
Political neutrality
Grok 3's political stance and future direction
When Musk unveiled Grok two years ago, he described it as edgy and "anti-woke," ready to take on controversial questions that other AI systems might shy away from. A study observed that Grok's responses aligned with left-leaning perspectives on transgender rights, diversity programs, and inequality Addressing these concerns, Musk has promised to make Grok "politically neutral." Grok is also under Indian government's radar for responding with Hindi slangs and abusive language on social media platform X.