Elon Musk’s xAI Launches ‘Remarkable, Terrifying’ Grok 4 Model

Elon Musk’s xAI has officially launched Grok 4, the latest iteration of its artificial intelligence model. The release arrives as a slew of public controversies have rocked Musk’s companies.

After much nail-biting, the livestream started an hour late from its original schedule for Wednesday night. The new model’s release was led by Musk, who opened the show with comments on how their work on AI has progressed so far.

“In some ways it’s a little terrifying, but the growth of intelligence here is remarkable,” Musk quipped on the livestream. “It only gets better from here.”

During discussions on scale and the economic impact of AI, Musk opined on the broader AI sector’s pursuit of so-called frontier intelligence.

“It’s somewhat unnerving to have created intelligence that’s somewhat greater than our own,“ Musk said, adding that given the pace, it might be tough to keep up. “I’d at least like to be alive to see it happen.”

In one particular demo, Grok was asked to sing in voice mode. Its response, instead, was to recite poetic lines in an attempt to soothe the user.

Positioned as a direct competitor to OpenAI’s highly anticipated GPT-5, Grok 4 promises significant advancements in multimodal capabilities, allowing it to “reason from first principle” and understand and produce more nuanced and complex responses across text, image, and audio formats.

One demo also showcased the foundation model’s capabilities for understanding video games, with features that enable it to determine “if a game is fun,” Musk said.

Another demo during the Grok 4 livestream showcased the model’s integration with Polymarket, an Ethereum-based prediction platform, utilizing X’s social media posts and live data analysis for bets, with this year’s Major League Baseball World Series serving as a sample case.

Good Grok

Musk has repeatedly positioned Grok as a bold alternative to established players, emphasizing greater transparency and fewer content restrictions.

Such frontier models could “bridge the gap between digital and physical world applications,” Leo Fan, co-founder of full-stack compute network Cysic, told Decrypt. “What sets it apart is its potential for integration across other ecosystems such as Tesla and SpaceX.”

“I believe we’ll see more models moving toward real-world, hardware-integrated applications rather than remaining purely in cyberspace,” Fan added.

Still, the road to Grok 4 has not been smooth. Just this week, Grok drew widespread criticism for generating inappropriate content, notably producing an offensive persona dubbed “MechaHitler.”

The AI-imagined persona inadvertently inspired meme coins that quickly surged and then crashed, illustrating the real-world consequences of unchecked AI outputs.

The controversy surrounding Grok escalated further with the resignation of Linda Yaccarino, CEO of X, who stepped down amid backlash tied to Grok’s problematic outputs. Yaccarino’s departure connects with broader concerns about the oversight and ethical frameworks at xAI and its related entities.

Less than a day after the ‘MechaHitler’ debacle, a line of code was deleted on the model’s codebase, quietly fixing the politically charged outputs.

Despite these setbacks, Musk and the xAI team continue to press forward.

Wednesday night’s livestream launch saw xAI introducing a new subscription tier called SuperGrok Heavy, priced at $300.

The new tier offers early access to SuperGrok Heavy, a high-performance version that features advanced reasoning, coding tools, priority support, and increased usage limits.

It also includes features from Grok 4, such as DeepSearch, Grok Studio, and a potential “Big Brain” mode designed for developers, researchers, and enterprises.

Notably, xAI has not confirmed whether full API access for Grok 4 will be available. However, partial endpoints, such as “grok-4-0629” and “grok-4-code-0629” are already live, with broader availability expected soon.