AI: Elon Musk's xAI rolls out Grok 4. RTZ #778
The fifth major LLM AI company in the US announced a major upgrade, and predictably, it’s scoring well in the ranks vs OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta et al.
I’m of course talking about Elon Musk’s X/xAI scrappy AI Grok of course, which rolled out Grok 4 with a host of new capabilities, up and down its different sizes and forms. And it had various pricing tiers to boot. Let’s unpack it a bit.
Axios summarizes the roll out quoting the confident words from Musk himself, in “xAI debuts Grok 4, “smartest AI in the world”“:
“Elon Musk unveiled the newest edition of xAI’s flagship AI model, Grok, late Wednesday night in a livestream video that touted Grok 4’s prowess at topping benchmark scores.”
Those benchmarks scores, as is tradition in LLM AI upgrade releases, inches ahead of competition in various categories in margins just enough to be worth writing about.
The prize is of course the fleeting ‘bragging rights’ on seemingly ephemeral rankings, complete with showy examples.
“Why it matters: xAI is in an accelerating race with OpenAI, Anthropic and other players to deliver faster, more reliable AI and fulfill the wild expectations investors now have for the technology.”
“Driving the news: Musk and several xAI researchers showed Grok 4 solving an advanced math problem, generating an image of two black holes colliding, and predicting the most likely winner of next year’s World Series (the Dodgers at a 21.6% chance).”
“xAI is claiming Grok as the new top-scoring model on Humanity’s Last Exam, a collection of very advanced problems, as well as on other yardsticks of AI progress.”
Lots of pressure of course to cite differences vs a globally crowded competitive environment.
So a key feature being touted are ‘agent swarms’ that can work together on the tasks at hand:
“Between the lines: Grok 4 includes a new “heavy” version that deploys multiple agents to collaborate on solving particularly tough problems.”
“Grok 4 is available to users immediately. The heavy mode is available at a $300 monthly rate.”
Voice of course is an included feature, especially as companies big and large are buffing up their offerings with that multimodal AI feature:
“The xAI researchers also demoed a new Grok 4 voice mode that’s more responsive and natural than Grok’s current one.”
“But the voice model faltered when asked to whip up an “opera about Diet Coke,” delivering what sounded more like a singsong Shakespeare monologue instead.”
“What they’re saying: Musk repeatedly expressed amazement at the accelerating rate of Grok’s advances — which, in his telling, seemed to be piling up even as he spoke.”
The ‘proud Dad’ moments definitely came through:
“Grok 4 is smarter than almost all graduate students in all disciplines simultaneously,” Musk first declared.”
“A few minutes later, he said, “Grok 4 is post-graduate, Ph.D. level in everything.”
“A minute later, Grok had become “better than Ph.D. level.”
And any shortcomings of Grok were of course scraped under the rug:
“What they’re not saying: Musk and xAI’s team asked Grok to solve a variety of problems in their hourlong demo.”
“But they didn’t once mention Grok’s extraordinary meltdown on Tuesday, when the bot began spouting antisemitic ideas and calling itself “MechaHitler.”
“Earlier Wednesday, Musk had addressed that separately, saying the platform had erred because it was “too eager to please” and that it would be fixed.”
“What’s next: Musk and his team promised a new coding model in August, a multimodal agent in September and a video-generating model in October.”
Also not discussed were the senior management changes at recently xAI merged company X/Twitter. And of course any possibility of a merger down the road with public entity Tesla, with its aspirations for AI humanoid Optimus robots and Robotaxis. And of course Elon’s longtime ambitions of an ‘Everything App’.
All far away from SpaceX and Starlink flights of fancy.
Right now, it’s Grok 4s momentary time in the sun this AI Tech Wave. Stay tuned.
(NOTE: The discussions here are for information purposes only, and not meant as investment advice at any time. Thanks for joining us here)
