Elon Musk’s AI startup, xAI, has launched an API for its Grok 3 model, even as Musk faces a countersuit from OpenAI. Despite legal challenges, the company is moving forward by offering developers access to Grok 3 xAI’s latest AI system, designed to rival OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Google’s Gemini.
Grok 3, which can analyze images and respond to complex prompts, has been integrated into features on X (formerly Twitter), which xAI acquired in March. Now available through an API, developers can choose between Grok 3 and a lighter version, Grok 3 Mini both marketed as having strong reasoning capabilities.
Pricing for the models varies: Grok 3 costs $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens, while Grok 3 Mini is significantly cheaper at $0.30 and $0.50 respectively. Speed-optimized versions of both models are available at a premium rate. However, Grok 3’s cost is notably higher than Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro, which also outperforms it in benchmark tests, despite xAI’s claims. Critics have accused the company of inflating Grok’s performance stats.
Another point of contention is the model’s context window the amount of data it can process at once. While xAI had claimed Grok 3 could handle up to 1 million tokens, the current API is capped at 131,072 tokens (about 97,500 words), leading to skepticism among users.
When Musk first introduced Grok two years ago, he positioned it as a more rebellious, uncensored alternative to mainstream AI, willing to tackle topics others wouldn’t. Although early versions lived up to that image with explicit language and edgy content, Grok still showed signs of political bias. A study found the model leaned left on sensitive issues like transgender rights and inequality something Musk attributed to its training data and vowed to correct. Whether xAI has successfully shifted Grok toward political neutrality remains unclear.
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