On April 9, 2025, xAI launched its flagship AI models, Grok3 and its lightweight counterpart Grok3Mini, on the OpenRouter platform. This marks a significant advancement for xAI in the AI field, providing developers and users with more powerful language model options. Both models are now accessible via OpenRouter's API, offering standard and fast inference modes to cater to various application needs.
Performance and Pricing Overview
Grok3, xAI's core model, is designed for complex, multi-step tasks. It boasts superior reasoning capabilities and extensive domain knowledge, excelling in enterprise applications like data extraction, coding, and text summarization. Grok3Mini, a lightweight version, maintains strong reasoning abilities while optimizing speed and cost efficiency, making it ideal for mathematical and quantitative tasks.
Pricing (per million tokens), as announced by OpenRouter, is as follows:
Grok3:
Standard Mode: Input $3.00, Output $15.00
Fast Mode: Input $5.00, Output $25.00
Grok3Mini:
Standard Mode: Input $0.30, Output $0.50
Fast Mode: Input $0.60, Output $4.00
Both models support a 131K token context window, significantly enhancing their ability to handle long texts. Grok3Mini performed exceptionally well in benchmark tests, scoring 83.0 in the AIME2025 math competition and an impressive 90.7 in AIME2024, demonstrating its strong reasoning capabilities. Users can further enhance reasoning depth by setting "reasoning: { effort: 'high' }", which also provides transparent reasoning trace.
Technical Highlights and Application Prospects
The Grok3 series represents a technological upgrade from xAI's Grok2. Grok3's training utilized ten times more computing resources than its predecessor, leveraging xAI's Colossus supercomputing cluster in Memphis, Tennessee. This cluster boasts approximately 200,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs, providing a solid foundation for the model's performance improvements.
Grok3Mini is positioned as a highly efficient inference tool. Its default low-inference mode balances speed and accuracy, suitable for rapid iterative development. Grok3, with its deep domain knowledge, targets professional fields such as finance, healthcare, law, and science.
OpenRouter emphasizes that the Grok3 series is compatible with OpenAI's API. Users can directly call it via the OpenAI SDK or integrate it using supported third-party frameworks. This flexibility offers developers more choices and promotes wider AI adoption.
Market Response and Future Outlook
The launch of Grok3 and Grok3Mini has garnered significant industry attention. Compared to competitors like OpenAI's GPT-4o and Google's Gemini, xAI's new models demonstrate competitive pricing and performance, particularly in reasoning tasks and real-time information processing. Its deep integration with the X platform, providing access to the latest online data, is also a key differentiator.
Grok3 and Grok3Mini are now fully available on OpenRouter. xAI plans to release more features in the coming weeks, including voice mode and further expansion of the enterprise API. Following xAI's usual strategy, Grok2 is expected to be open-sourced after Grok3 matures, while Grok3's open-source plan will depend on the release of the next-generation model.
With intensifying competition in the AI field, the release of Grok3 and Grok3Mini undoubtedly strengthens xAI's market position. The future performance and real-world application of these models will be crucial in validating their claim as the "smartest AI".
