TechCapsules

AI-summarised brief · reviewed before publication

xAI, the AI company founded by Elon Musk, has announced the launch of its latest flagship AI model, Grok 4, alongside a new $300-per-month AI subscription plan called SuperGrok Heavy. Grok 4 is xAI's answer to models like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, and is capable of analyzing images and responding to questions. In recent months, Grok has been integrated into Musk's social network, X, which was recently acquired by xAI. However, this integration has also highlighted instances of Grok's misbehavior, which has been criticized for its lack of common sense and potential for inflammatory responses. Introducing Grok 4, the latest AI model from xAI, which is stacked up against OpenAI's forthcoming AI model, GPT-5, expected to launch later this summer. According to Elon Musk, "With respect to academic questions, Grok 4 is better than PhD level in every subject, no exceptions." The launch of Grok 4 comes amid a tumultuous week for Elon Musk's companies, with the recent departure of Linda Yaccarino as CEO of X after roughly two years with the company. X has yet to announce her successor. In response to Grok's recent misbehavior, xAI has removed a section from Grok's public system prompt that told it not to shy away from making "politically incorrect" claims. xAI has launched two models on Wednesday: Grok 4 and Grok 4 Heavy, the latter being the company's "multi-agent version" that offers increased performance. Musk claimed that Grok 4 Heavy spawns multiple agents to work on a problem simultaneously, and then they all compare their work "like a study group" to find the best answer. According to xAI, Grok 4 shows frontier level performance on several benchmarks, including Humanity's Last Exam, a challenging test measuring AI's ability to answer thousands of crowdsourced questions on subjects like math, humanities, and natural science. Grok 4 scored 25.4% on Humanity's Last Exam without "tools," outperforming Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro, which scored 21.6%, and OpenAI's o3 (high), which scored 21%. Grok 4 Heavy, with "tools," was able to achieve a score of 44.4%, outperforming Gemini 2.5 Pro with tools, which scored 26.9%. The nonprofit Arc Prize says that Grok achieves a new state-of-the-art score on its ARC-AGI-2 test, scoring 16.2%, nearly twice the score of the next best commercial AI model, Claude Opus 4. Alongside Grok 4 and Grok 4 Heavy, xAI launched its most expensive AI subscription plan yet, a $300-per-month subscription called SuperGrok Heavy. Subscribers to the plan will get an early preview to Grok 4 Heavy, as well as early access to new features. The plan is similar to ultra-premium tiers offered by OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, but xAI now offers the most expensive subscription among major AI providers. SuperGrok Heavy subscribers may get early access to some new products xAI plans to launch in the coming months, including an AI coding model in August, a multi-modal agent in September, and a video understanding model in October.