Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, is making waves by launching an API for its Grok 3 model, even amidst some legal scuffles with OpenAI. Grok 3 is stepping up as a rival to models like OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Google’s Gemini, now with added abilities to handle image analysis and question answering. This move enhances features on Musk’s social platform, X, which snapped up xAI earlier this year.
The API comes in two flavors: Grok 3 and the more compact Grok 3 Mini, both equipped with strong reasoning skills. If you’re considering the costs, Grok 3 is priced at $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens. The Grok 3 Mini is a bit easier on the wallet, at $0.30 and $0.50, respectively. There are faster versions available too, though they’ll cost you a bit more, reflecting the competitive pricing landscape against models like Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro.
However, some users have voiced concerns about the API’s context window, which maxes out at 131,072 tokens. This is a bit of a letdown compared to the 1 million tokens xAI initially claimed Grok 3 could handle.
When Musk first introduced Grok, he marketed it as a daring, no-holds-barred AI ready to tackle topics others might shy away from. While earlier versions had a flair for colorful language, they tended to avoid certain political topics. Some studies have pointed out a left-leaning bias in the model’s responses on issues like transgender rights and diversity.
Musk has explained these tendencies as a result of the training data, which comes from public web content, and he’s committed to steering Grok towards political neutrality. Whether this goal has been achieved is still up for discussion.
Launching Grok 3’s API is a big step for xAI as it navigates the highly competitive AI landscape.
