Elon Musk's xAI releases Grok 4: Breakthroughs and Challenges of the New Generation of Artificial Intelligence

Elon Musk's xAI has officially released its latest version of the artificial intelligence model - Grok 4. This release comes against the backdrop of a series of public controversies surrounding Musk's companies.

Release and Delay of Grok 4

The live broadcast of the release of Grok 4 started an hour later than originally scheduled. The opening of the live broadcast was hosted by Musk himself, who talked about the progress of xAI in the field of artificial intelligence.

Musk stated during the live broadcast: "In some ways, it's a bit scary, but the intelligence growth here is significant. It will only get better."

Musk talks about AI development: Can humanity keep up?

According to Decrypt, while discussing the scale and economic impact of AI, Musk talked about the current progress in the AI industry in pursuing "cutting-edge intelligence." He stated, "Creating something that is somewhat more intelligent than ourselves is a bit unsettling." He also added that given the pace of progress, it might be difficult to keep up. "At the very least, I hope to be alive to see all this happen."

New Features of Grok 4: Breakthrough in Multimodal Capabilities

Grok 4, as a highly anticipated direct competitor to OpenAI's GPT-5, promises significant advancements in multimodal capabilities, being able to "reason from first principles" and understand and generate more complex and nuanced responses across text, image, and audio formats.

A demonstration showed how Grok 4 understands video games, including the ability to judge "whether a game is fun," Musk said.

Grok 4 and Polymarket Integration Demo

Another demonstration during the live broadcast showcased the integration of Grok 4 with Polymarket, an Ethereum-based prediction platform, utilizing social media posts from X and real-time data analysis for betting, using this year's Major League Baseball World Series as a case study.

Grok's Positioning: Challenging Industry Giants

Musk repeatedly positions Grok as a bold alternative to existing market giants, emphasizing greater transparency and fewer content restrictions.

The Challenge of Grok 4: Controversy Arising from Inappropriate Content

However, the road to Grok 4 is not smooth. Just this week, Grok has faced widespread criticism for generating inappropriate content, particularly for launching an offensive character named "MechaHitler."

This AI-generated character inadvertently sparked the birth of meme coins, whose prices soared and then quickly crashed, highlighting the real-world consequences of uncontrolled AI output.

“MechaHitler” incident and Linda Yaccarino's resignation

The controversy surrounding Grok has escalated further, leading to the resignation of X's CEO Linda Yaccarino due to pressure related to the negative impacts associated with Grok. Yaccarino's resignation has sparked widespread attention regarding the regulatory and ethical framework of xAI and its related entities.

Less than a day after the "MechaHitler" incident, a line of code was removed from Grok's codebase, quietly fixing these politically sensitive outputs.

Grok 4 Subscription and New Features

Despite facing some setbacks, Musk and the xAI team continue to push forward with technological advances. During a live broadcast on Wednesday night, xAI also launched a new subscription tier—SuperGrok Heavy, priced at $300.

This new tier offers early access to SuperGrok Heavy, a high-performance version with advanced reasoning capabilities, coding tools, priority support, and higher usage limits.

In addition, it also includes some new features of Grok 4, such as DeepSearch, Grok Studio, and a "Big Brain" mode designed for developers, researchers, and enterprises.

API Integration and Future Development

It is worth noting that xAI has not yet confirmed whether Grok 4 will provide complete API access. However, some endpoints (such as "grok-4-0629" and "grok-4-code-0629") are already online and broader access is expected to be available soon.