Hajra Naz
Despite being hit with a countersuit from OpenAI, Elon Musk’s AI startup, xAI, is pushing forward—this time by making its Grok 3 model available via API access.
A few months ago, Grok 3, xAI’s response to Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s GPT-4o, was released. The model can analyze images and answer questions, and it already powers multiple features on X (formerly Twitter), which xAI acquired in March.
Developers can now access two versions of the model via API: Grok 3 and a lighter version, Grok 3 Mini, both equipped with “reasoning” capabilities.
Pricing Breakdown
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Grok 3:
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$3 per million input tokens (~750,000 words)
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$15 per million output tokens
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Grok 3 Mini:
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$0.30 per million input tokens
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$0.50 per million output tokens
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For faster processing, premium versions are available:
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Grok 3: $5 input / $25 output
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Grok 3 Mini: $0.60 input / $4 output
In terms of cost, Grok 3 is on par with Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet but more expensive than Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro, which currently outperforms Grok 3 in many industry benchmarks. Some have even accused xAI of misleading benchmark reporting.
Additionally, the API’s context window — the amount of text the model can process at once — is limited to 131,072 tokens (about 97,500 words), which falls short of the 1 million tokens xAI previously claimed Grok 3 could handle.
When Musk first introduced Grok two years ago, he promoted it as bold, uncensored, and anti-woke, designed to answer controversial questions other AIs wouldn’t touch. While Grok 1 and 2 occasionally delivered on that promise — often using vulgar language when prompted — they still hesitated around political issues.
A study even found earlier versions of Grok leaned left on topics like diversity, inequality, and transgender rights. Musk attributed this to Grok’s training data from public web sources and pledged to shift future models toward a politically neutral stance.
However, aside from brief censorship blunders — such as temporarily hiding unflattering posts about Donald Trump and Musk himself — it’s unclear if xAI has fully delivered on that neutrality promise with Grok 3, or what the broader implications might be going forward.
