Grok-3 Mini
Compact Grok-3 variant for cost-effective conversations.
You always get the exact model you pick — we never silently route you to another.
About Grok-3 Mini
Grok-3 Mini punches well above its price point for structured reasoning — at $0.30 per million input tokens, it scored 95.8% on AIME 2024 and 80.4% on LiveCodeBench, numbers that rival models costing several times more. Its 0.69-second time-to-first-token is unusually fast for a reasoning model, making it a practical choice when latency actually matters in production. The standout differentiator is native access to live X data, giving it a real edge for tracking breaking news or social sentiment that static-knowledge models simply cannot match. Users consistently praise its concise reasoning traces and cost efficiency for math, logic, and quantitative work. That said, real-world coding reliability is a known weak spot — community reports diverge from the benchmark numbers, with users finding it unreliable on practical programming tasks outside controlled evaluations. If your workload centers on structured problem-solving, agentic pipelines, or monitoring fast-moving topics, Grok-3 Mini delivers serious capability at a price that keeps inference costs manageable. General-purpose coding or broad factual recall is better served elsewhere.
Best for
- Math, logic, and quantitative reasoning where benchmark accuracy (95.8% AIME) translates to real gains
- Real-time social sentiment and trending topic research via native X/Twitter data integration
- Cost-sensitive agentic pipelines and automation workflows that need function calling and structured outputs
- Long-context document analysis using its 128K token window
- Latency-sensitive reasoning tasks where a 0.69-second time-to-first-token matters
Specifications
| Provider | xAI |
|---|---|
| Released | 2025-05-19 |
| Intelligence | Medium |
| Speed | Medium |
| Context window | 131,072 tokens |
| Knowledge cutoff | February 28, 2025 |
| Input price | $0.30 / 1M tokens |
| Output price | $0.50 / 1M tokens |
| Request cost | 1 base request |
| Plan tier | Base |
| Model ID | grok-3-mini |
Frequently asked questions
Input tokens are $0.30 per million and output tokens are $0.50 per million — significantly cheaper than full Grok-3 and competitive with other small reasoning models.
131,072 tokens (128K), which is enough to process large documents or multiple files in a single call.
Structured math and reasoning tasks, quantitative analysis, and anything benefiting from real-time X data. Its AIME 2024 score of 95.8% is a standout for a model at this price tier.
Real-world coding reliability is inconsistent — community feedback suggests it underperforms on practical programming problems despite solid benchmark numbers. Hallucination rates on topics outside X's trending sphere are also higher than Claude or ChatGPT.
Grok-3 Mini trades some raw capability for much lower cost and faster inference. It is the right choice when budget and latency matter more than squeezing out maximum performance.
Yes. The Reasoning variant produces longer chains of thought and can be significantly slower, generating far more output tokens than the standard mode. Enable it when accuracy on hard problems matters; skip it when speed is the priority.