"We're Seeing Heavy Traffic": Musk's Grok Chatbot Tops No. 1 On App Store, Overtaking ChatGPT & TikTok

Days after Elon Musk and his xAI team unveiled Grok-3—touted as the "smartest AI on Earth"—the chatbot, which outperforms all commercially available models, has surged to the top of the Apple App Store list. 

Data from the App Store shows that xAI's Grok app sits number one on the "Top Free App" page, beating OpenAI's ChatGPT, Meta's Threads, and TikTok.

This surge in demand for Grok likely began around the release of the new model on Monday night. 

Musk and xAI staff showed how the new model outperformed Alphabet's Google Gemini, DeepSeek's V3 model, Anthropic's Claude, and OpenAI's GPT-4o across math, science, and coding benchmarks.

Momentum was reignited on Wednesday night after Musk announced that Grok-3 would be "free to all" for a limited time.

For a short time, Grok 3 is available for free to all! https://t.co/r5iLXi2pBm

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 20, 2025

By Thursday morning, Musk and xAI had encountered a good problem: "We're seeing some heavy traffic, so we've opted for an alternate model to get your answer to you faster." 

This was the message generated while asking the model to produce an image. 

We asked Grok... It responded:

XAI noted overnight: "This is it: The world's smartest AI, Grok 3, now available for free (until our servers melt)."

This is it: The world’s smartest AI, Grok 3, now available for free (until our servers melt).

Try Grok 3 now: https://t.co/Tj0afLoxEz

X Premium+ and SuperGrok users will have increased access to Grok 3, in addition to early access to advanced features like Voice Mode pic.twitter.com/YgKavSCiWr

— xAI (@xai) February 20, 2025

That time may have arrived.