Even though OpenAI recently filed a lawsuit against Elon Musk, his AI company, xAI, is pushing forward.
xAI has just made its latest AI model, Grok 3, available through an API, allowing developers and businesses to integrate it into their apps and services.
Grok 3, which was introduced a few months ago, is xAI’s answer to powerful models like OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Google’s Gemini. It can analyze images and answer questions and is already being used in various features on Musk’s social media platform, X, which officially acquired xAI in March.
There are two versions of the Grok 3 model available via API: Grok 3 and a smaller, lighter version called Grok 3 Mini. Both models include advanced reasoning abilities.
As for pricing, Grok 3 costs $3 per million input tokens (about 750,000 words) and $15 per million output tokens. Grok 3 Mini is much cheaper, at $0.30 for inputs and $0.50 for outputs. Faster versions are also available but at a premium — up to $25 per million output tokens for the high-speed Grok 3 model.
Compared to other popular models, Grok 3 is on the pricey side. It’s priced similarly to Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet but costs more than Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro, which has scored higher in many AI performance tests. Also, some users have pointed out that Grok 3’s actual capabilities may not match xAI’s earlier claims. For example, although xAI said it could handle 1 million tokens in one go, the current API maxes out at around 131,000 tokens.
When Grok was first launched, Elon Musk promoted it as an “edgy” and uncensored alternative to mainstream AI tools like ChatGPT. Early versions of Grok were known for answering controversial questions and using strong language. However, those versions still avoided some sensitive political topics and leaned left on issues like diversity and transgender rights, according to research.
Musk blamed that political bias on the model’s training data, which came from public internet content. He has promised to make Grok more politically neutral. While some content filters have been relaxed, it’s still unclear whether xAI has fully reached its goal — and what impact that may have in the future.
