Billionaire Elon Musk, recently countersued by OpenAI, continues to advance his AI company, xAI, with the launch of an API for its flagship Grok 3 model. Several months after the initial unveiling of Grok 3, which competes with platforms like OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Google’s Gemini, the model is now available through an API that enables clients to leverage its advanced image analysis and question-answering abilities. Grok 3 powers various features on Musk’s social network, X, which acquired xAI in March.
The API comes in two variations: Grok 3 and Grok 3 Mini, both equipped with reasoning capabilities. Pricing for Grok 3 is set at $3 per million tokens for input and $15 for output tokens, while Grok 3 Mini is priced at $0.30 for inputs and $0.50 for outputs. Premium versions of both models are also available for users needing faster processing speeds, priced at $5 and $25 per million tokens for Grok 3, and $0.60 and $4 for Grok 3 Mini. However, Grok 3’s costs are relatively high compared to competitors, matching the pricing of Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet and exceeding that of Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro, which has recently outperformed Grok 3 in various benchmarks.
Users have noted that Grok 3’s API has a limited context window of 131,072 tokens, much smaller than the claimed capacity of 1 million tokens. Originally marketed by Musk as an unfiltered, edgy AI model, Grok 3 has faced criticism for perceived political biases, particularly leaning left on topics like diversity and inequality. Musk attributes these issues to the training data sourced from public web pages and has promised efforts to make Grok more politically neutral. As xAI navigates these challenges, it remains to be seen how these adjustments will impact the model’s future and its reception in the competitive AI landscape.
