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After days of controversy surrounding a flurry of antisemitic responses made recently by his Grok AI-powered chatbot on his social network X (formerly Twitter), a seemingly unrepentant and unbothered Elon Musk launched the latest version of his AI model family, Grok 4, during an event livestreamed on X last night, calling it the “the smartest AI in the world.”
As Musk posted on X: “Grok 4 is the first time, in my experience, that an AI has been able to solve difficult, real-world engineering questions where the answers cannot be found anywhere on the Internet or in books. And it will get much better.”
The new release actually includes two distinct models: Grok 4, a single-agent reasoning model, and Grok 4 Heavy, a multi-agent system designed to solve complex problems through internal collaboration and synthesis.
Both models are optimized for reasoning tasks and come with native tool integration, enabling capabilities such as web search, code execution, and multimodal analysis.
Musk and his team at xAI showcased benchmarks that suggest Grok 4 outperforms all current competitors across a range of academic and coding evaluations, even compared to formerly leading AI reasoning model rivals OpenAI o3 and Google Gemini.
However, xAI has not yet released a model card nor any official release notes documentation for Grok 4 to the public, making it challenging to independently assess performance and the claims made during the stream. We’ll update if/when these become available.
Nor did Musk and his xAI team members participating in the livestream address the glaring controversy facing Grok over the past week, including many incidents of Grok making antisemitic remarks or referring to itself as “MechaHitler“, and suggesting that people with Jewish surnames should be handled decisively by Adolf Hitler — a seemingly overt reference to the Holocaust and genocide of 6 million Jews during World War 2.
The closest Musk came was when he stated: “The thing that I think is most important for AI safety—at least my biological neural net tells me the most important thing—is to be maximally truth-seeking,” and “We need to make sure that the AI is a good AI. Good Grok” as well as “It’s important to instill the values you want in a child that would grow up to be incredibly powerful.”
However, Musk did not apologize nor did he accept responsibility for Grok’s antisemitic, sexually offensive, and conspiratorial remarks. Here’s a cop of the full stream below:
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