DeepSeek + More GPUs = Grok 3

Elon Musk’s xAI has officially launched Grok 3, and it’s making waves, even in the DeepSeek waters! With 200k GPUs powering up Grok 3, xAI is stepping up as a serious challenger to OpenAI, DeepSeek, and even Anthropic.

By: Mohit Pandey

Trained on double the compute of its predecessor (100k to 200k GPUs in just 92 days), Grok 3 has outperformed Google Gemini 2 Pro, DeepSeek V3, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and GPT-4 in multiple AI benchmarks. And now, Musk has hinted at a future where “Starship rockets to Mars will be carrying Optimus robots and Grok”.

But is Grok Really that Great?

The live demo had Grok 3 generating animated 3D plots of a Mars mission, designing a new game by merging two classics and writing a Python script for a ball bouncing inside a spinning tesseract.?        

“Grok 3 might be the best base LLM for real-world physics!” said Hyperbolic Labs’ Yuchen Jin. Just like OpenAI and DeepSeek, Grok 3 is pushing reasoning capabilities further with its Big Brain mode for advanced problem-solving.

It already beats OpenAI o3 Mini (high), DeepSeek R1, and Gemini 2 Flash Thinking models. “We’re seeing the beginnings of creativity with Grok 3,” said Musk. “If you ask AI to create a game like Tetris or Bejeweled, there are many examples on the internet for it to copy,” he added.?

Speaking of games, Musk has confirmed that the company is launching a game studio to reshape the industry and is looking to hire people for several roles.?

Back to Grok 3—it hasn't won everyone over.

Dharmesh Shah from HubSpot commented, “Feels more like a DeepSeek [model] with just more compute. Looking forward to playing with it when it actually launches.” DeepSeek had access to around 50,000 NVIDIA GPUs, consisting of 10,000 H800 GPUs, 10,000 H100 GPUs, and a substantial number of H20 GPUs. It will be interesting to see what DeepSeek can accomplish if it can scale up to 200,000 GPUs.

Meanwhile, Andrej Karpathy noted that for xAI to reach state-of-the-art levels in just a year is “unprecedented”. He also believes that the DeepSearch feature of Grok 3 is at Perplexity’s level but not quite OpenAI’s Deep Research—yet.

Click here to read all details about Grok 3.

Apart from Musk’s xAI,

• OpenAI has teased new open-source models and is gearing up for GPT-4.5 and GPT-5. “Trying GPT-4.5 has been much more of a ‘feel the AGI’ moment than I expected!” said Sam Altman.
• OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever is set to raise over $1 billion for his startup Safe Superintelligence Inc, which is valued at more than $30 billion.
• Anthropic has developed a new hybrid AI model that uses more computational resources for complex queries that require reasoning.
• Mira Murati, the former CTO of OpenAI, has finally revealed the name of her startup: Thinking Machines Lab. The company focuses on open science and foundational AI research.