Grok 3: Another Win For The Bitter Lesson

Congratulations to the xAI team — and the advocates of the scaling laws

I. The scaling laws govern AI progress

For once, it seems Elon Musk wasn’t exaggerating when he called Grok 3 the “smartest AI on Earth.” Grok 3 is a massive leap forward compared to Grok 2. (You can watch the full presentation here.)

Grok 3 performs at a level comparable to, and in some cases even exceeding, models from more mature labs like OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic. It tops all categories in the LMSys arena and the reasoning version shows strong results — o3-level — in math, coding, and science questions (according to benchmarks). By most measures, it is, at the very least, co-state-of-the-art (not at every task, though).

In one word, Grok 3 is great.

But more than just a win for xAI, Grok 3 represents yet another victory for the Bitter Lesson. Perhaps the clearest one so far…