New Delhi, April 5 || As the artificial intelligence (AI) turf war escalates, Elon Musk-owned Grok and Chinese DeepSeek models now stand at the forefront of AI capability -- one optimised for accessibility and efficiency and the other for brute-force scale -- despite the vast disparity in training resources, a report showed on Saturday.
Grok-3 represents scale without compromise -- 200,000 NVIDIA H100s chasing frontier gains, while DeepSeek-R1 delivers similar performance using a fraction of the compute, signalling that innovative architecture and curation can rival brute force, according to Counterpoint Research.
Since February, DeepSeek has grabbed global headlines by open-sourcing its flagship reasoning model DeepSeek-R1 to deliver performance on a par with the world’s frontier reasoning models.
“What sets it apart isn’t just its elite capabilities, but the fact that it was trained using only 2,000 NVIDIA H800 GPUs — a scaled-down, export-compliant alternative to the H100, making its achievement a masterclass in efficiency,” said Wei Sun, principal analyst in AI at Counterpoint.
Musk’s xAI has unveiled Grok-3, its most advanced model to date, which slightly outperforms DeepSeek-R1, OpenAI’s GPT-o1 and Google’s Gemini 2.
“Unlike DeepSeek-R1, Grok-3 is proprietary and was trained using a staggering 200,000 H100 GPUs on xAI’s supercomputer Colossus, representing a giant leap in computational scale,” said Sun.