# Grok 3

> xAI's 2025 flagship — ~10x the training compute of Grok 2, with a Think reasoning mode and DeepSearch.

- Maker: xAI (Grok)
- Line: Grok (flagship)
- Canonical page: https://ai-tldr.dev/models/grok-3/
- Updated: 2026-06-18

## In short

Grok 3 is xAI's 2025 flagship — ~10x the training compute of Grok 2, with a Think reasoning mode and DeepSearch. It costs $3.00 per million input tokens and $15.00 per million output tokens. You can use it through xAI.

## Facts

| Fact | Value | Source |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Context window | 131K tokens (xAI API). xAI marketed a 1M-token capability for the model. | [1] |
| Input price | $3.00 / 1M tokens (cached $0.75 / 1M tokens) | [2] |
| Output price | $15.00 / 1M tokens | [2] |
| Licence | Proprietary · API only | [1] |
| Released | 17 February 2025 | [3] |
| Knowledge cutoff | November 2024 | [1] |

## Sources

1. [xAI Docs — Models](https://docs.x.ai/developers/models)
2. [xAI Docs — May 15, 2026 Model Retirement](https://docs.x.ai/developers/migration/may-15-retirement)
3. [Grok 3 Beta — The Age of Reasoning Agents (xAI announcement)](https://x.ai/news/grok-3)

## Overview

Grok 3 is the flagship large language model xAI released on February 17, 2025, succeeding Grok 2. xAI says Grok 3 was trained with roughly 10x the compute of Grok 2 on its Colossus supercomputer (reported to scale to around 200,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs), and shipped alongside a smaller, faster Grok 3 mini.

The headline change in Grok 3 was explicit reasoning: a Think mode lets the model spend extra test-time compute to work through problems step by step, with the reasoning trace visible to the user. xAI also debuted DeepSearch, an agentic research mode that queries the web and X in real time to assemble summaries. The Grok 3 generation is text-only as an API model — native image input arrived later with Grok 4.

As a developer model, grok-3 (and the cheaper grok-3-mini) was served through the xAI API with a 131K-token context window. It was retired from the API on May 15, 2026, after which requests to the grok-3 slug redirect to grok-4.3 and bill at grok-4.3 pricing.

## Benchmarks

- AIME 2025 (math, Think mode): 93.3% ([source](https://x.ai/news/grok-3))
- GPQA Diamond (graduate science, Think mode): 84.6% ([source](https://x.ai/news/grok-3))
- LiveCodeBench (code, Think mode): 79.4% ([source](https://x.ai/news/grok-3))

## Pricing

- Input: $3.00 / 1M tokens per 1M tokens
- Cached input: $0.75 / 1M tokens per 1M tokens
- Output: $15.00 / 1M tokens per 1M tokens

grok-3 standard tier. A faster grok-3-fast tier was priced at $5 input / $25 output, and grok-3-mini at $0.30 input / $0.50 output. After the May 15, 2026 retirement, grok-3 requests bill at grok-4.3 rates ($1.25 / $2.50).

Source: https://docs.x.ai/developers/migration/may-15-retirement

## Strengths

- Strong reasoning in Think mode — 93.3% on AIME 2025, 84.6% on GPQA Diamond and 79.4% on LiveCodeBench (per xAI, with test-time compute)
- DeepSearch agentic web/X research baked into the Grok product
- Visible chain-of-thought: the Think trace is exposed, not hidden
- A cheaper, faster Grok 3 mini tier for cost-sensitive workloads

## Best for

- Math and competition-style problem solving with Think mode
- Graduate-level science and technical Q&A
- Code generation and debugging
- Real-time research and summarization over the web and X via DeepSearch
- General-purpose chat assistance in the Grok app

## How to access

- [xAI](https://docs.x.ai/developers/models) — model id `grok-3`

## Grok (flagship) versions

- [Grok 4.3](https://ai-tldr.dev/models/grok-4-3/) (30 April 2026)
- [Grok 4.20](https://ai-tldr.dev/models/grok-4-20/) (March 2026)
- [Grok 4.1](https://ai-tldr.dev/models/grok-4-1/) (17 November 2025)
- [Grok 4](https://ai-tldr.dev/models/grok-4/) (9 July 2025)
- Grok 3 (17 February 2025) — this page
- [Grok 2](https://ai-tldr.dev/models/grok-2/) (20 August 2024)
- [Grok 1.5](https://ai-tldr.dev/models/grok-1-5/) (15 May 2024)
- [Grok 1](https://ai-tldr.dev/models/grok-1/) (3 November 2023)

## FAQ

### When was Grok 3 released?

xAI released Grok 3, its flagship model, on February 17, 2025, alongside a smaller Grok 3 mini.

### Is Grok 3 still available?

Not as a standalone API model. xAI retired grok-3 on May 15, 2026; requests to the grok-3 slug now redirect to grok-4.3 and bill at grok-4.3 pricing. The grok-3 name continues to resolve, so old code does not break.

### What is Grok 3's Think mode?

Think mode is Grok 3's explicit reasoning setting. It spends extra test-time compute to reason through a problem step by step and exposes the reasoning trace. With this mode and additional test-time compute, xAI reported 93.3% on AIME 2025, 84.6% on GPQA Diamond and 79.4% on LiveCodeBench.

### Does Grok 3 accept images?

No — the Grok 3 API model is text-only. Native image input came later, with Grok 4 in July 2025.

## Links

- [Grok 3 Beta — The Age of Reasoning Agents (xAI announcement)](https://x.ai/news/grok-3)
- [xAI Docs — Models](https://docs.x.ai/developers/models)
- [xAI Docs — May 15, 2026 Model Retirement](https://docs.x.ai/developers/migration/may-15-retirement)
- [Grok (chatbot) — Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grok_(chatbot))

Source: AI/TLDR LLM registry, https://ai-tldr.dev/models/grok-3/