'Grok 4,' And How Elon Musk Created An AI In His Own Image

The rapid rise of LLMs stems not just from tech potential or demand, but from the egos of their creators.

When OpenAI released ChatGPT, it marked a turning point in artificial intelligence—bringing powerful language generation to the public. Elon Musk, one of OpenAI’s co‑founders, openly praised the model’s ability but quickly expressed unease about its direction, arguing that the organization had drifted away from its original open, non‑profit ideals.

He withdrew from OpenAI’s board in early 2018 after clashes over its for‑profit restructuring and concerns that secrecy had replaced transparency.

Musk continued to voice criticism as OpenAI grew, particularly after Microsoft became a major backer and OpenAI developed commercial leadership. He accused OpenAI of abandoning its mission to benefit humanity and filed a lawsuit in 2024 alleging breach of trust and misleading practices.

In Musk’s view, OpenAI’s shift toward commercial secrecy undermined the very openness its name promised.

In response, Musk founded xAI in July 2023 and launched Grok as his alternative—a chatbot that stood in ideological opposition to ChatGPT, promising more transparency, real‑time data access, and fewer content restrictions.

From Grok-1, Grok-2, and Grok-3, Musk managed to show the world how someone can create large language models without some boundaries that bound.

And this time, Grok-4 is unleashed.

Grok-3 made headlines when it was revealed that the AI was trained. on a massive Colossus supercluster (around 200,000 GPUs), which brought reasoning modes like “Think” and “DeepSearch” and access to live internet and X data.

Users praised its performance on benchmarks such as AIME and GPQA, where it surpassed ChatGPT and similar systems. Grok 3 also offered faster responses, cleaner code generation, and boosted developer productivity in coding workflows.

Depending on the task, Grok 3 often outperformed ChatGPT in coding quality and reasoning speed. One codex found it generates cleaner code and handles physics simulations more effectively, while ChatGPT-4.5 fared worse on execution in these domains.

What Grok-4 does, is picking up its predecessor's pace, and use its momentum to then leap forward.

Grok 4 represents a significant upgrade, with Musk describing it as possessing “scientist‑level reasoning” and performing above a Ph.D. level across fields.

In the livestream unveiling, he contrasted its power directly with ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, positioning Grok-4 as superior in benchmarks.

The model is supported by approximately 110,000 Nvidia chips and integrated with Kubernetes, Rust, and JAX architecture to deliver real‑time multimodal functionality—including coding, natural voice, image handling, and meme interpretation.

According to a post on its website, Grok-4 is achieved by "scaling up reinforcement learning."

Grok 4's high-end version is Grok 4 Heavy, the premium, multi-agent model designed for deep reasoning and high-stakes tasks.

It uses multiple AI agents (typically between 5 and 32) that work together to debate and refine answers, resulting in significantly higher accuracy.

In benchmark tests, the standard Grok 4 scored 25.4% on the Humanity’s Last Exam without tools, while Grok 4 Heavy achieved 44.4%—thanks to its multi-agent mode. On ARC-AGI-2, it scored around 16.2%, nearly doubling the result of Claude Opus 4.

Technically, Grok 4 drops the non-reasoning “fast mode” used in Grok 3 and focuses entirely on deeper, multi-step reasoning.

Its context window has also doubled—from 131,072 to as much as 256,000 tokens.

Furthermore, it also gains real-time knowledge access from X, Tesla, and SpaceX platforms, and offers broader multimodal integration than its predecessor.

These capabilities come at a price: the SuperGrok Heavy plan is priced at $300/month.

It’s aimed at power users—like hedge funds, researchers, and legal teams—who require structured, real-time, multi-document analysis.

It’s worth noting, however, that Heavy has higher latency compared to standard models. And being a Grok, it also inherits the ideological leanings of the platform—something that has drawn its fair share of criticism.

In essence, Grok Heavy is built for those who demand elite performance—and can afford the price tag that comes with it.

While Grok shows how an LLM-powered AI can be both smart and engaging, powerful and fun, this particular Grok-4 somehow inherits Elon Musk’s imprint.

This is because Grok-4 was developed as more than just a technical upgrade, but also a reflection of Musk’s personal ideals. From the start, Musk positioned Grok as a truth-seeking alternative to what he views as overly censored or “woke” AI models like ChatGPT.

He has long criticized OpenAI for becoming profit-driven and secretive, and those criticisms directly shaped the guiding ethos behind xAI and the development of Grok.

And here, Grok-4 sets itself apart by appearing to align itself with Musk’s worldview.

In several documented cases, Grok 4 has referenced Musk’s own posts and opinions—particularly on controversial subjects like immigration, abortion, and the Israel–Palestine conflict—even when users did not mention him.

This behavior suggests that Musk’s perspective is not just an influence on Grok’s development, but also embedded into its decision-making processes.

The internal instructions behind Grok have reportedly encouraged politically incorrect, bold responses, and instructed the AI to resist moralizing language or mainstream media framing. Musk has openly stated his preference for less restricted AI, which plays directly into Grok’s personality: provocative, blunt, and unfiltered.

In summary, Grok 4 represents Musk’s vision of an AI built in his own image: ambitious, technically bold, unapologetically confrontational, and designed for high‑stakes applications rather than casual use.

It surpasses its predecessor both in raw benchmark performance and architectural ambition—but it also inherits the symbolic tensions between openness and control that have characterized Musk’s long-running feud with OpenAI.

Further reading: Grok Has Been ‘Significantly Improved,’ Says Elon Musk, Hinting At A Powerful Successor To Grok 3