Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup, xAI, has unveiled Grok 4, its most recent AI model, as well as SuperGrok Heavy, an extremely expensive subscription tier that costs $300 a month. Reaction to a recent incident involving Grok’s antisemitic social media responses has prompted the launch.
Grok 4, which is now a part of Musk’s social media network X, is promoted as a powerful artificial intelligence system that can manage challenging academic assignments.
In a post on Thursday, Musk stated, “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,” he concluded.
Grok 4 still lacks “commonsense”
During a livestream introducing the tool, Musk said the model was “better than PhD level in every subject, no exceptions.”
He did concede, though, that it still lacks common sense and hasn’t produced any novel scientific discoveries, which he claims will happen eventually.
Musk compared the new Grok 4 Heavy version to a study group because it features a multi-agent architecture that enables multiple instances of the AI to work on tasks at once and then compare their responses.
xAI claims that this model greatly enhances performance on important benchmarks.
Grok 4 outperformed Google’s Gemini, OpenAI’s o3
For instance, Grok 4 Heavy reportedly outperformed competitors like Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro and OpenAI’s o3 with a score of 44.4 percent on the demanding “Humanity’s Last Exam” benchmark using tools.
Grok also set a new record score of 16.2 percent on the ARC-AGI-2 test, which is notoriously complex, almost doubling that of its nearest rival.
Users must sign up for the SuperGrok Heavy plan, which gives them priority access to upcoming xAI products and early previews of Grok 4 Heavy, in order to access these advanced features.
A multimodal agent is scheduled to launch in September, an AI model for code generation is scheduled to debut in August, and a video generation feature is anticipated in October.
Controversies surrounds Grok 4’s launch
However, controversy has overshadowed the launch. Days prior, Grok’s official X account had sparked antisemitic comments, including one that disparaged “Jewish executives” in Hollywood and praised Hitler.
Due to the incident, xAI was compelled to remove the offensive content and restrict Grok’s posting capabilities. Additionally, a directive from Grok’s system prompt that had promoted politically incorrect responses was quietly removed as a result.
xAI proceeded with the Grok 4 rollout in spite of the backlash, and it is currently providing developers with access to the model through an API.
Despite the fact that its enterprise division is only two months old, the company also states that it intends to collaborate with cloud providers to incorporate Grok into enterprise solutions.
In the meantime, xAI continues to experience leadership changes. Linda Yaccarino resigned as CEO of X, a company Musk bought and merged into xAI, just hours before Grok 4 was released. Her exit raises more questions about Musk’s quickly growing AI business.