Grok 4 is coming – and with it a 300 US dollar subscription

First anti-Semitism, then a new model. xAI releases Grok 4, which according to Elon Musk is the "smartest AI in the world". Musk presented the AI model together with some developers in a livestream at X. What amazes him is how quickly AI learns and develops –, especially compared to humans, who do not learn as quickly.

In addition to the model, a new subscription was also announced. This costs 300 US dollars a month and is therefore even more expensive than the subscription models that other providers such as OpenAI and Perplexity have up their sleeves. It shows that AI is expensive and must also be financed by users.

Grok 4, the powerful reasoning model

Musk explains and shows demos in the livestream in which Grok 4 completes tasks that the model has never seen before and whose answers are not available on the internet. This refers to accusations against benchmarks that AI models are unable to deduce the correct answers, but have virtually memorized them. Accordingly, Grok 4 is a reasoning model like Grok 3, but ten times more computing power has been put into it.

Grok 4 will probably have to compete with OpenAI's GPT-5. This is due to be released this summer and will of course be much better than its predecessor. Above all, however, the new version should be available to everyone and make choosing a suitable model obsolete, Sam Altman wrote in an X article.

According to Elon Musk, Grok 4 is better than any PhD student in any field. And it's only a matter of time before the model "discovers new physics". The model appears as Grok 4 and Grok 4 Heavy with even better agentic capabilities. The presentation video states that the larger version of the model can achieve more than 44 percent "with tools" in Humanes Last Exam, a particularly difficult benchmark. For comparison: Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro achieves 26.9 percent.

Previously, however, Grok has attracted rather unpleasant attention with anti-Semitic statements. Even Hitler was praised in some answers. The posts on X, where Grok can also be reached directly, are all said to have been deleted. In the meantime, access to Grok was restricted. The reason for the outbursts is said to have been a system prompt that asked the chatbot to give politically incorrect answers. One of the consequences is the resignation of Linda Yaccarino, CEO of X.

In addition to the new model, xAI has also introduced a new subscription. SuperGrok Heavy costs 300 US dollars per month and offers early access to Grok 4 Heavy and new features – The video mentions a video generator and an agent that will be released soon. The offer is roughly equivalent to all more expensive subscriptions from AI providers. At 300 US dollars, however, xAI is the most expensive.

(emw)