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After days of controversy surrounding a flurry of antisemitic responses made recently by his Grok AI-powered chatbot on his social network X (formerly Twitter), a seemingly unrepentant and unbothered Elon Musk launched the latest version of his AI model family, Grok 4, during an event livestreamed on X last night, calling it the “the smartest AI in the world.”
As Musk posted on X: “Grok 4 is the first time, in my experience, that an AI has been able to solve difficult, real-world engineering questions where the answers cannot be found anywhere on the Internet or in books. And it will get much better.”
The new release actually includes two distinct models: Grok 4, a single-agent reasoning model, and Grok 4 Heavy, a multi-agent system designed to solve complex problems through internal collaboration and synthesis.
Both models are optimized for reasoning tasks and come with native tool integration, enabling capabilities such as web search, code execution, and multimodal analysis.
Musk and his team at xAI showcased benchmarks that suggest Grok 4 outperforms all current competitors across a range of academic and coding evaluations, even when compared to formerly leading AI reasoning model rivals, such as OpenAI o3 and Google Gemini.
However, xAI has not yet released a model card or any official release notes documentation for Grok 4 to the public, making it challenging to independently assess its performance and the claims made during the stream. We’ll update if/when these become available.
Nor did Musk and his xAI team members participating in the livestream address the glaring controversy facing Grok over the past week, including many incidents of Grok making antisemitic remarks or referring to itself as “MechaHitler“, and suggesting that people with Jewish surnames should be handled decisively by Adolf Hitler — a seemingly overt reference to the Holocaust and genocide of 6 million Jews during World War 2.
The closest Musk came was when he stated: “The thing that I think is most important for AI safety—at least my biological neural net tells me the most important thing—is to be maximally truth-seeking,” and “We need to make sure that the AI is a good AI. Good Grok” as well as “It’s important to instill the values you want in a child that would grow up to be incredibly powerful.”
However, Musk did not apologize, nor did he accept responsibility for Grok’s antisemitic, sexually offensive and conspiratorial remarks. Here’s a copy of the full stream:
Throughout the livestream, the team emphasized Grok 4’s ability to reason from first principles, correct its own errors and potentially invent new technologies or uncover novel scientific insights.
The presentation also included demonstrations of Grok 4 Heavy, which applies multi-agent collaboration to tackle research-level problems across disciplines.
Availability and pricing
Grok 4 is available now through several channels, depending on user type and subscription level:
API Access (for developers and enterprises):Grok 4 and Grok 4 Heavy are live via the xAI API. Pricing is structured as follows:
$3 per 1 million input tokens
$15 per 1 million output tokens
$0.75 per 1 million cached input tokens
Prices double after 128,000 tokens in a single context windowThe API supports text and image inputs, function calling, structured outputs, and offers a 256,000-token context window.
Consumer Access (via Grok chatbot and apps):Individual users can access Grok 4 through the Grok chatbot on X, the Grok app (iOS and Android), and X.com, but only with one of the following subscriptions:
PremiumPlus: $16/month
SuperGrok: $300/month
A new “SuperGrok Heavy …