Elon Musk. Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images Just a few weeks after everyone freaked out about DeepSeek, Elon Musk’s Grok-3 has again shaken up the fast-moving AI race. The new model is ending the week at the top of the Chatbot Arena leaderboard , while the Grok iOS app is at the top of the App Store, just above ChatGPT. Even as Musk appears to be crashing out from his newfound political power, his xAI team has managed to deploy a leading foundational model in record time.
It’s one thing to have the leading model; it’s another to build the biggest user base around it. Musk seems to understand that if he wants to crush OpenAI, he has to shift attention away from ChatGPT. Since the debut of Grok-3, Musk has said that ChatGPT-like voice interaction and desktop apps are coming soon. Where his product roadmap appears to differ considerably from OpenAI’s is xAI’s nascent efforts to build an AI gaming studio, though the details there are scarce.
While its Deep Research reports are nowhere near as in depth as OpenAI’s, Grok-3’s “thinking” capabilities appear to be roughly on par with o1, according to Andrej Karpathy , who noted in his deep dive comparison that “this timescale to state of the art territory is unprecedented.”
Given all this, it’s probably not a coincidence that OpenAI decided this week to disclose that ChatGPT now has 400 million weekly active users — a 33 percent increase from December. Even with its many hooks into X, Grok certainly has far fewer users than that.
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