Road to Grok 3: How Elon Musk and xAI team built the “smartest AI on earth” – and what happens now

On November 3, 2023, xAI announced “Grok”, an AI modelled after Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The goal—or mission statement, rather—was to understand the universe by giving “humanity” easy access to advanced tools for questioning, reasoning, and more, much in the same way one would use, say for instance, OpenAI’s ChatGPT or China’s DeepSeek R1.