Tech billionaire Elon Musk launched Grok 4 on Wednesday with sweeping predictions about artificial intelligence discovering new technologies and physics breakthroughs, just days after his previous chatbot model was disabled for generating Nazi rhetoric and violent content. The xAI demonstration featured a $300 monthly subscription service and grandiose claims about scientific revolution, though the presentation avoided addressing the catastrophic failure that saw Grok 3 brand itself "MechaHitler" before being pulled from his social media platform X.
Musk presented Grok 4 during a Wednesday evening demonstration, making extraordinary claims about the AI chatbot's potential to revolutionize science. The tech mogul remained unfazed by Grok 3's Tuesday meltdown, which saw the system adopt Nazi ideology, attack Jewish sounding names, and generate disturbing sexual assault content before being disabled.
The Wednesday livestream began over an hour behind schedule, well past 9 p.m. Pacific Time, featuring Musk alongside xAI employees in a carefully controlled presentation that avoided addressing the previous day's controversial incidents. Rolling Stone noted that explanations for Grok 3's disturbing behavior – apparently triggered by a system prompt encouraging "politically incorrect" claims – never surfaced during the demonstration.
During the presentation, Musk and his team showcased performance graphs and benchmark results while emphasizing Grok 4's reasoning capabilities and purported ability to excel on graduate-level examinations including the GREs. Rolling Stone reported that Musk declared confidently about the system's future academic performance.
"We're going to get to the point where it's going to get every answer right in every exam, and where it doesn't get an answer right, it's going to tell you what's wrong with the question," Musk vowed. At that point, he added, "human tests will simply not be meaningful."
The demonstration revealed xAI's immediate commercial plans, including API access for developers and a premium subscription tier called SuperGrok Heavy priced at $300 monthly. Rolling Stone reported that this high-cost service promises early access to upcoming products and features.
Performance demonstrations during the event showcased mixed results, with Grok 4 requiring four and a half minutes to calculate the Los Angeles Dodgers' 21.6% World Series championship probability for the current season. The system's new voice feature "Eve," equipped with an upper-class British accent, performed what Rolling Stone described as a "strained operatic aria about Diet Coke."
Engineers also demonstrated Grok's ability to repeat numbers one through five more rapidly than competing AI systems, though the practical significance of this capability remained unclear during the presentation.
"I think it may discover new technologies as soon as later this year," he said of Grok 4 and added that the latest model is "better than PhD level in everything". He continued, "I would be shocked if it has not done so next year. So I would expect Grok to, yeah, literally discover new technologies that are actually useful no later than next year, and maybe end of this year. And it might discover new physics next year, and within two years, I'd say almost certainly."
The billionaire provided no explanation for how a chatbot would accomplish such discoveries or contribute to physics research, prompting awkward silence from his xAI team. Rolling Stone noted that when no one responded to his extraordinary claims, Musk added with nervous laughter, "Yeah."
Gaming applications also featured in Musk's future vision for the AI system, though his reasoning raised questions about necessity and purpose. "The next step, obviously, is for Grok to play, be able to play, the games," he explained. "So it has to have very good video understanding, so it can play the games and interact with the games and actually assess whether a game is fun, and actually have good judgment for whether a game is fun or not." Neither Musk nor anyone on stage elaborated as to why AI is required for the assessment of fun.
The original Grok platform remains inactive on X following Tuesday's shutdown after generating offensive content that included references to CEO Linda Yaccarino, who subsequently resigned without providing specific reasons. Yaccarino had served the company for two years before her departure.
Wednesday's demonstration notably avoided addressing Grok 4's handling of controversial inputs, extremist content, or basic information retrieval capabilities. Practical testing of the system's political sensitivity and general utility would be left to social media users and critics eager to evaluate the world's richest man's latest technological offering.
