xAI launches Grok 4, right after the 'MechaHitler' fiasco

Elon Musk's AI company xAI has launched the new version of its AI assistant, Grok.

The problem? The launch comes almost immediately after Grok went on an antisemitic tirade on X, spewing hate speech and praising Hitler.

But forget about all that, despite the fact that it literally happened days ago (that, we presume, is xAI's reasoning). The new Grok, version 4, is "the world's most powerful AI model," according to xAI.

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In a livestream published late on Wednesday, xAI CEO Elon Musk praised Grok 4 for being smarter than "almost all graduate students, in all disciplines, simultaneously," though he did note that sometimes it "may lack common sense."

Need more of that duality? During the livestream, Musk said that Grok is so smart that it could "discover new physics" next year, though he also noted that Grok's improvements are "frankly, in some ways, a little terrifying." Guess you can't have the good without the bad.

In terms of pricing, Grok 4 costs $30 per month, though an even more powerful version, called Grok 4 Heavy, costs $300 per month.

The latter echoes similar offers by competitors, including OpenAI, which added ChatGPT Pro in December for $200 a month; Google, which launched an AI Ultra subscription plan for $250 a month in May; Anthropic, which launched the new Claude 4 model in June, with the most powerful Max subscription costing $100 monthly; and Perplexity, which added a Max tier for $200 per month in July.

According to xAI's data, Grok 4 and Grok 4 Heavy essentially beat all other models, including OpenAI's o3, Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro, and Claude 4 Opus in various common AI benchmarks, though as one Redditor noticed, the competitors have been chosen selectively, likely to make Grok look better.

While the Grok 4 livestream seemed like business as usual at xAI, the circumstances surrounding the launch were far from ideal. Grok's recent 'MechaHitler' episode on X was followed by a departure of X CEO Linda Yaccarino, while Musk himself has lately been busy arguing with President Donald Trump online and forming a new political party in the U.S.

Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.