August 11 — Elon Musk announced today on social media that Grok 4, the latest large-scale AI model developed by his AI company xAI, is now available to all users for free. Free users can run a limited number of queries per day, with the option to subscribe for additional usage.
According to xAI, Grok offers two usage modes:
- Auto Mode: The system automatically routes complex queries to Grok 4 for optimal handling.
- Expert Mode: Users manually control task allocation for greater precision.
Technical Highlights of Grok 4
Launched on July 10, 2025, Grok 4 marks the fourth major iteration since the company’s first model debuted in 2023. It comes in two versions:
- Grok 4 (Standard): Supports single-agent reasoning.
- Grok 4 Heavy: A multi-agent version for collaborative reasoning.
Both are pure reasoning models with a context window of up to 256K tokens, enabling them to process extremely long inputs.
Musk claims Grok 4 is “the most powerful AI model in the world”, with academic problem-solving capabilities at the level of a PhD.
Performance and Benchmark Comparisons
Official benchmarks show Grok 4 excels in real-time response, complex reasoning, and advanced visual understanding—directly challenging flagship models from OpenAI and Anthropic.
According to third-party testing platform Artificial Analysis, Grok 4 achieved the following “intelligence index” scores:
- Grok 4: 73
- OpenAI o3: 70
- Google Gemini 2.5 Pro: 70
- Deepseek R1-0528: 68
- Anthropic Claude 4 Opus: 64
These results place Grok 4 at the forefront of the current AI landscape.
Industry Impact
Experts believe Musk’s decision to make Grok 4 free is both a direct play for market share and a bold challenge to competitors like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. As high-performance AI models become more accessible, adoption barriers will fall, but competitive pressure in the AI industry will intensify.
