Grok 4, the latest iteration of the AI chatbot from Elon Musk’s xAI, debuted Wednesday and has been labeled by the artificial intelligence company as “the world’s most powerful AI model.”
Since introducing Grok in 2023, xAI has been working to advance the functionality of the conversational AI assistant, which can answer users’ questions as well as interpret and generate images — similar to tools like ChatGPT from OpenAI and Google Gemini.
In a livestream on X, Musk and his xAI colleagues covered some of the benchmarks used to evaluate Grok 4, noting that it can perform “better than PhD level in every subject” on academic questions and “excelled on all the reasoning benchmarks that people usually test on.”
A graph displayed during the livestream showed that Grok 4 scored better than its OpenAI and Gemini counterparts on Humanity’s Last Exam, a set of 2,500 advanced questions compiled by subject matter experts across areas like mathematics, physics, engineering and humanities.
“I think it may discover new technologies as soon as later this year. And I would be shocked if it has not done so next year . . . And it might discover new physics next year. And within two years, I’d say almost certainly,” Musk said.
Grok 4, which became available after the livestream through a $30 per month SuperGrok subscription, is the single agent version, while xAI also unveiled Grok 4 Heavy as the multi-agent version. Users can access the version through a premium SuperGrok Heavy subscription for $300 per month. Musk explained that Grok 4 Heavy has multiple agents working independently on problems that “essentially compare notes and then yield an answer.”
Musk noted xAI is working to improve Grok’s image understanding and generation capabilities, which he currently considers to be its “biggest weakness.” The chatbot also made headlines in the days leading up to the Grok 4 announcement after it made recent “inappropriate posts” on X that included antisemitic comments. The messages were deleted and a July 8 post on the Grok account states xAI “has taken action to ban hate speech before Grok posts on X.”
The Grok 4 release coincided with the launch of a new set of voices to enhance Grok’s voice mode, which has also had its latency reduced.