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Elon Musk is pressing forward with Grok just days after the AI chatbot went rogue with a string of antisemitic posts. Last night, he unveiled the latest model, Grok 4, along with a $300-per-month subscription tier, SuperGrok Heavy.
At the livestreamed launch event, Musk toed a fine line when describing the chatbot's current capabilities, admitting its flaws while touting AI's "terrifying" rate of progress. The last model, Grok 3, came out in February.
"Grok 4 is better than PhD-level in every subject, no exceptions," he says. "That doesn't mean at times it may lack common sense, and it has not invented new technologies or discovered new physics, but that is just a matter of time."
The reference to a "lack of common sense" may allude to the chatbot's string of "inappropriate posts" earlier this week, as its parent company xAI put it. In one example, it praised Adolf Hitler, calling him "harsh...but effective against today's chaos." Musk blamed the behavior on the chatbot being "eager to please" and easily manipulated. It's possible xAI was tweaking the model ahead of the Grok 4 release. It fixed the issue by deleting a line of code, Decrypt reports.
The SuperGrok Heavy plan is a high-performance version of the chatbot, promising advanced reasoning, and increased usage limits. It runs on a second model revealed at the event, Grok 4 Heavy. Musk described it as a “multi-agent” system, where multiple AIs tackle a problem simultaneously, then compare their results—"like a study group"—to arrive at the best answer.
Musk says Grok 4 beats OpenAI's model performance, and he might be right. The nonprofit ArcPrize ranks it number one on its AGI leaderboard, with double the score of the second-ranking model, Anthropic's Claude Opus 4, TechCrunch reports. We'll see if that holds once the ChatGPT-maker releases its next model, GPT-5, later this year. It will likely have a focus on AI agents as well, but those capabilities may cost more than ChatGPT's existing $200-per-month Pro plan.
If you aren't ready to shell out serious cash for a chatbot prone to hate speech, you can try Grok for free on X (formerly Twitter), or pay for the more affordable SuperGrok plan ($30-per-month)—but keep in mind, that's still more expensive than OpenAI's $20-per-month ChatGPT Plus plan, and uses an older Grok model without the latest capabilities.