An hour after the live stream was supposed to start last night (July 9), Elon Musk and a few members of his xAI team introduced us to Grok 4 on xAi.
The long-winded announcement shared the news of multimodal features, faster reasoning and an upgraded interface, something Musk compared to an era of "Big Bang Intelligence."
The release comes amid growing backlash over racist responses from Grok’s earlier versions, prompting public outcry and renewed scrutiny over content moderation (or the lack thereof).
To add fuel to the fire, xAI’s CEO Linda Yaccarino said Wednesday she is stepping down from her role. Yaccarino was the first permanent CEO Elon Musk hired after buying the platform in 2022.
On paper, Grok 4 is Musk’s most ambitious AI model yet. The model is expected to rival OpenAI’s GPT-5 and Anthropic’s Claude 4 Opus, both of which have recently dominated headlines for their real-time speed, reasoning and advanced vision.
"We've run out of test questions to ask," Musk boasted during the launch, adding "Reality is the ultimate reasoning test."
But Grok isn’t just trying to compete; it’s trying to survive a credibility crisis. The platform’s unfiltered “free speech” approach has led to concerning outputs, including racist and biased content that circulated widely over the weekend.
That’s raised big questions about how much testing and guard-railing xAI has actually done, especially as it rushes toward real-time, humanlike interaction.
Musk, who has increasingly positioned xAI as a foil to “woke” models like ChatGPT and Gemini, has been largely silent on the controversy.
Whether Grok 4 represents a true leap forward, or just more chaos in a faster wrapper, remains to be seen.
Freatures and weaknesses
- Advanced reasoning: Grok 4 has been trained on xAI’s Colossus supercomputer for advanced, scientist-grade reasoning. The model promises stronger logical reasoning and text generation.
- Uses same model physicists use”Clarify: “Trained on xAI’s Colossus supercomputer for advanced, scientist-grade reasoning”Mentions of recent controversies.
- A coding-focused variant: Developers will appreciate Grok 4 Code, a specialized model designed to write, debug and explain code more efficiently, echoing tools like GitHub Copilot or GPT-4 Code Interpreter.
- Multimodal capabilities: Grok 4 is expected to support not only text, but images and possibly video, with Musk mentioning that's one of their biggest weaknesses. Better multimodal capabilities would bring the model closer competition with OpenAI’s GPT-5o and Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro. Grok 4 may support video at some point.
- Voice features: Grok 4 Voice features a natural, human-like voice with fewer interruptions.
- Real-time web access: Like earlier Grok models, Grok 4 features DeepSearch, a tool that pulls in live data from the web, especially from Musk’s X platform. That means Grok can provide up-to-date results during chats — no separate tab or browser needed.
- Cultural fluency and meme smarts: One of Grok’s biggest differentiators is its understanding of internet culture. Grok 4 is being tuned to interpret memes, slang and humor with high accuracy, potentially making it one of the most "online" AI assistants yet.
Final thoughts
With OpenAI preparing GPT-5 and Google pushing Gemini even further, the launch of Grok 4 is part of the growing arms race between major tech companies. But while others focus on reliability and alignment, xAI is betting on personality, humor and speed and a strong developer base.
If Grok 4 lives up to the hype, it could appeal to power users who want real-time search, smart coding help, and fewer guardrails. But it remains to be seen whether this edgier, uncensored AI can avoid the pitfalls that plagued its predecessors.
Grok 4 is a big swing from Elon Musk. It's bold, controversial and packed with features meant to challenge the norms of AI assistants.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that xAI’s chief scientist, Igor Babuschkin, had resigned. He remains with the company. The resignation mentioned earlier refers to Linda Yaccarino, CEO of X (formerly Twitter), which is a separate company from xAI.
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